Review of Catfish (2010) by Cameron J — 26 Jul 2011

A film's concept, no matter how intelligent or brilliant it may be, is not enough to carry a film .Catfish is a good example of this. It has a brilliantly clever concept but lacks the execution and depth to become something that is truly memorable.

Though what this film provides the audience is a solid exploration into online relationships and the potential fabric of lies that may shadow them. There is much debate to whether this film is real or not but i'm going to take Catfish at face value and for this reason, as its a documentary its hard to talk about character depth or to talk generally about the characters but in the case of Catfish I feel that its necessary, all the characters show little emotion, show little compassion and have little charisma - which I feel would improve this film greatly. The story of the film is predictable from the half way point, but somehow it managed to keep me intrigued until the uncovering of the mystery, I assume it was due to the odd circumstances that the film was building upon. This film feels empty at times and takes over an hour to reach it's big uncovering which proves to be one that is underwhelming and somewhat disappointing. It tries to recover at the end by adding some empathetic behavior but this ended up being borderline patronizing...