Unfriended (2014)
Directed by Levan Gabriadze
While video chatting one night, six high school friends receive a Skype message from a classmate who killed herself exactly one year ago. At first they think it's a prank, but when the girl starts revealing the friends' darkest secrets, they realize they are dealing with something out of this world, something that wants them dead.
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23 films that influenced Unfriended
What critics say influenced Unfriended
Like those of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity — both of which inspire scenes here — Unfriended's techniques are certain to be copy-pasted into imitators, some of which might improve upon it.
Perhaps the lead character's name is an homage to "The Blair Witch Project," the mother of all herky-jerky, low-budget horror films.
During the film’s most intense moments, “Cybernatural” amplifies the effect of that infamous shot from “The Blair Witch Project,” the one where Heather Donahue turns the camera on herself, oozing snot and tears into the camera as she hyperventilates.
Halloween , The Blair Witch Project and the recent It Follows delve into teenage alienation, loss of innocence and the uncertainty of adulthood, even though each one also features a supernatural phantom wreaking terror.
Like The Blair Witch Project, which turned the first person POV found footage approach into a now well-worn waste of time, and Paranormal Activity, which mounted a similarly styled camera on a tripod to capture the spooky goings-on in a couple’s suburban home, this macabre novelty finds a group of friends haunted by the spirit of their dead girl, a friend who killed herself over cyberbullying.
It does for Skype what The Blair Witch Project did for forests.
Like those of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity — both of which inspire scenes here — Unfriended's techniques are certain to be copy-pasted into imitators, some of which might improve upon it.
Jason Blum , producer of such low-budget winners as the Paranormal Activity and superior Purge franchises, obviously hopes to start another, praying the teen audience will “friend” this concept — which was directed by Levan Gabriadze but felt more like it could have been helmed by Mark Zuckerberg.
After what feels like 18 "Paranormal Activity" movies, it's hard to make found footage seem fresh, but "Unfriended" manages it by keeping its audience plugged in like a character.
Like The Blair Witch Project, which turned the first person POV found footage approach into a now well-worn waste of time, and Paranormal Activity, which mounted a similarly styled camera on a tripod to capture the spooky goings-on in a couple’s suburban home, this macabre novelty finds a group of friends haunted by the spirit of their dead girl, a friend who killed herself over cyberbullying.
But, like the Paranormal Activity movies (the supernatural; home surveillance; found footage; Jason Blum), the simplicity of the premise becomes the appeal of fearing it.
Director Levan Gabriadze takes the played-out found footage genre of the Paranormal Activity movies and gives it a fresh spin.
Perhaps unwittingly, first time director Levan Gabriadze and screenwriter Nelson Greaves, working from a high concept sprung from the inventively tasteless imagination of Timur Bekmambetov (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”), have come up with a way to distract patrons from dithering with their smartphones while watching “Unfriended.”
Based on a concept by director-producer Timur Bekmambetov (Ben-Hur, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), writer Nelson Greaves’ screenplay unfolds more like a play than a feature film, a quality that works to its credit.
The most recognizable name is Timur Bekmambetov, the cult filmmaker (“Night Watch”) turned Hollywood name (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”), who cooked up the idea of making a movie that unfolds almost entirely on computer windows.
Written by someone who worked on stunts for "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" and overseen by the director of "Yolki 2" and "Yolki 3" but not the original "Yolki" (surely you've seen the entire Russian trilogy), "Unfriended" unfolds entirely on the screen of good girl Blaire's (Shelley Hennig) MacBook.
The plot is a cyber-rehash of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and its endless ilk; yet another ghost in the machine coiling to shout “Boo!” Sometimes characters behave logically.
In essence, it's just an online version of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" as filtered through the visual look of "Timecode."
A morality tale about cyberbullying with shades of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “The Ring,” “Unfriended” should be applauded for addressing a very serious issue in today’s culture of anonymity-driven public shaming, but the fact that it’s surrounded by so much stupidity weakens its message.
Una cruza entre Sé lo que hicieron el verano pasado (I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997) y Saw: juego macabro (Saw, 2004) para los millennials.
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Like James Woods being physically seduced by his TV in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, the real horror here is our irritating antiheroes’ inability to pull themselves away from their laptops.
Any home electronic device can be perceived as a interloper: the early 1980s saw a wave of films such as Poltergeist and Videodrome, that portrayed the humble TV set as a portal to scary unknown realms.
“ Unfriended ,” a horror thriller from the Russian producer-director team of Timur Bekmambetov and Levan Gabriadze, is part of a long, proud tradition of visual gimmickry pressed into service on behalf of genre, from the seemingly unbroken single take of Alfred Hitchcock’s “ Rope ” and Robert Montgomery’s subjective camera in “ Lady in the Lake ” to the poly-format “ Project X .”
The faceless threat of the computer screen has long proved a fertile source of fear for film-makers, with slashers such as Eric Weston’s 1981 Evilspeak (a mainstay of the “video nasties” panic) making merry with the spectre of the post-Demon Seed download long before the dawn of the internet.
Back in 2000, director Mike Figgis took that notion to the extreme in "Timecode."
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“ Unfriended ,” a horror thriller from the Russian producer-director team of Timur Bekmambetov and Levan Gabriadze, is part of a long, proud tradition of visual gimmickry pressed into service on behalf of genre, from the seemingly unbroken single take of Alfred Hitchcock’s “ Rope ” and Robert Montgomery’s subjective camera in “ Lady in the Lake ” to the poly-format “ Project X .”
The most recognizable name is Timur Bekmambetov, the cult filmmaker (“Night Watch”) turned Hollywood name (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”), who cooked up the idea of making a movie that unfolds almost entirely on computer windows.
Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (who made the kick-ass vampire film “Night Watch”) produced the film and the young filmmakers he’s selected for the project definitely show some skill and a willingness to try and be innovative in how they approach the structure of a horror film.