Review of Unfriended (2014) by Cdougall — 18 Aug 2021

Unfriended, from academic and filmmaking standpoints, is actually pretty interesting because other than literally the final second of the movie, the entire thing takes place on a computer screen, making it really unique and unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

Unfriended has college level concepts in it that make it worth watching despite its flaws and manages to exploit and add anxiety to things that commonly happen on computers that we don’t normally make a big deal about.

These things happen frequently and they mean nothing to us, but they mean a lot to the characters in this movie and heighten the fear and horror despite how relatively minor they are. The structure of this movie will be very familiar to teens and young adults in the era of modern technology which gives it a sense of relatability that I did appreciate.

The way the characters react to each other and the horror component of this movie is extremely realistic and accurate of how people would react in the real world, as is the way they respond to it. They take appropriate actions to attempt to deal with the horror part of this movie, something I also liked.

In general, Unfriended doesn’t rely on protagonist curiosity/stupidity to further along the plot or make the movie go in a totally new direction; the characters try to be as smart as they can be to resolve the conflicts in the movie, even if some of those resolutions aren’t too pretty.

The horror itself isn’t bad; the movie (spoiler alert) manages to make a glitch of someone staring at a camera frozen really scary and probably the most terrifying moment of the whole movie. A lot of the horror in this movie is stupid, but that shot wasn’t and was effective.

Unfortunately, Unfriended suffers from a lot of story and plot stupidity and important things not making sense. There were other ways this movie could’ve been executed that would been much better for me and caused the components that didn’t make sense to make a lot more sense, which would’ve helped the film flow better overall.

I don’t fully understand what was causing the characters to have the fates that they did since my understanding was that the supernatural presence was limited to the computer screen, and yet many scenes in the movie suggest otherwise.

The core premise of this movie doesn’t work too well for me which is disappointing because the structure is really interesting. Unfriended got close to being a really enjoyable movie for me and really just suffers from things not making sense and flowing badly which causes it to falter at crucial moments when it could’ve really shined and been an effective work of art in the horror genre.