Movie Review: Unfriended

Director: Levan Gabriadze

Starring: Shelley Hennig, Renee Olstead, Will Peltz, Moses Jacob Storm, Jacob Wysocki, Courtney Halverson and Heather Sossaman

With the success of the Paranormal Activity series, found footage has found a new home in the horror genre. But let’s not give credit to that series for starting the trend. The first known found footage horror film was 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust and after that followed a series of B movies until in 1999, when The Blair Witch Project scared audiences half to death. All Paranormal Activity did was pull an Eccleston and revive the genre for the newer generation.

And because of the success of the film, sequels followed, but it didn’t have the same effect as its predecessor. It leaves many people to wonder — will movies from 2015 onwards continue to be sequels, remakes and found footage garbage?

That is until I watched Unfriended. While the premise as a whole seems completely lackluster, the movie brought the classic jump scares and acting that made me feel like I could actually enjoy horror movies again. But, I shouldn’t get ahead of myself.

In short, Unfriended takes you in the point of you of the main protagonist’s laptop. From there, the movie pulls you into a Skype conversation with Blair (Shelley Hennig) and her friends. The beginning of the film sets up that a year earlier, a young classmate (Heather Sossaman) commits suicide after being humiliated on several social media networks following a drunken stupor. Angry at her classmates and seeking revenge, the vengeful spirit then plays a game with the group, possessing them one by one, forcing them to kill themselves. Not only can the spirit possess humans but also Facebook accounts, Skype and even Spotify.

The cast is believable, in large part to the fact that most of them are unknown actors with the exception of Hennig, who can be seen on Teen Wolf as Malia Tate (FUN FACT: if you look closely at her Google Chrome tabs, you can see that one of the tab have the Teen Wolf MTV page). The movie seems like a Degrassi episode gone deadly with backstabbings, jealousies and affairs. Ah, high school.

While the film is obviously far from reality, it does shed light on the effects of cyberbullying. It’s a story, unfortunately, many of us know all too well. In some instances, we’ve either been one of three things: the victim, the aggressor or the bystander.