Our Highest Rec: Unfriended Is a Bad Movie with a Sweet Gimmick

Like petting zoos, the XFL, and Chat Roulette, Unfriended is one of those things that was way better in concept than execution. You can tell they thought of this movie’s gimmick—let’s make the whole thing just a live feed of a computer screen—before they put together any semblance of a story, and that means there’s a ton of silliness and stupidity packed into its stringbean 85 minutes. Make no mistake: Unfriended is bad, but at the same time, its concept is so good that it’s super easy to recommend. It’s fun-bad. It’s interesting-bad. You wish more horror movies tried stuff like this.

Here’s the elevator pitch for Unfriended: Found-footage horror flick, except the found footage is all from Skype. A group of pretty teenagers (well, if I’m being honest, 3.5 out of the 6 kids are pretty, which I appreciate as an accurate representation of high-school cliques) start a video chat, but then an old account belonging to this other student who died one year earlier joins their convo. The dead person’s account starts talking to them, then it starts harassing them, and “harassing them” in this case means things like, uh, making one guy put his neck on a bunch of blender blades. Like I said: fun-bad.

There’s a bunch of yadda-yadda stuff here about how the dead chick was bullied a lot and betrayed a lot and how this might be a revenge thing or prank thing, but none of that stuff matters. Frankly, Unfriended takes the dumbest possible path through its premise. The characters don’t really act dumb, per se, it’s just the actual story beats are stupid. This isn’t a movie where you ask, “Why don’t they stop recording?” It’s a movie where you ask, “Wait, that’s the real explanation for all this?” It leaves you rolling your eyes a bit.

But, Unfriended does manage to keep you around with its amazing Skype gimmick, and it uses every last ounce of its creativity funneling all the scares through common Internet mechanics. The computer we’re watching the whole time belongs to our protagonist, Blair (Unfriended really shafts Blair. Instead of using its first 10 minutes to align the audience with a spunky, brave, funny heroine, it gives us a silly bow-chicka-wow-wow moment between her and her boyfriend, in which she semi-strips for him and they promise to lose their virginity to each other on prom night. Yeah, Unfriended’s horse in the “strong women in horror movies” race collapsed from heat exhaustion right out of the gate), and the movie doesn’t leave Blair’s screen the entire runtime. That means every connection glitch, every jump between windows, and every frantic Google search becomes part of the story. The Mac’s color-wheel loading thingy becomes a thrilling object of tension, and when Blair covers her Skype window with another window because she needs to side-message her boyfriend or search for a YouTube video, the click back into the Skype app becomes an awful moment of “Oh no, what are we going to see this time?”

It’s great Halloween-party fodder—Unfriended would be a blast in a crowd—but it’s also a conceit that accidentally nails the individual stream-from-the-laptop experience. I watched the movie by myself (shut up) with a pair of headphones, and it was spooky, man. Being able to click out of it was a relief, but that also contributed to a few suck-it-up moments when I had to click back in, and that put me on a weird level of same-ness with the victims in the movie. Yeah, those victims were douchebags and I didn’t really care about them, but for a second, I was with them.

Unfriended’s gimmick takes the found-footage genre to its logical conclusion, to the point where I can’t really think of another way someone would screw around with the can’t-cut-away formula. It’s a fitting capstone: While classics like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are better movies, Unfriended has more technical flourish, and its presentation boosts its scares in a way that I think those other movies don’t quite pull off. There’s a permutation of both Blair Witch and Paranormal that doesn’t use found-footage and is still scary; that alternative doesn’t exist for Unfriended. The Skype stuff makes it frightening. That’s neat.

That point also underlines the idea that this is a uniquely modern movie. It could only exist right now, and the chance of its Skype structure becoming outdated is decently high. Really, you could blow this thought experiment through the roof and start thinking about the next iteration of the “if only they had cell phones” complaint. If only the people in Unfriended had teleportation or VR chat rooms! It’s giving the movie way too much credit to say it was thinking along this edge, but it’s fun to know it can take you there if you give it enough leash.

In the short-term, Unfriended is really just a dumb movie that uses tech in a really, really smart way. Its gimmick is so good the story almost doesn’t deserve it, but those two components merge so much it would be hard to separate them in the first place. In five years, this movie could just as easily procure a cult following as it could become a relic. I hope it’s the former: Boring-bad movies (and boring-good movies!) don’t push anything forward or do anything inspiring, but Unfriended is unique-bad, and that feels momentous. It’s like tech: The best updates are structural, not aesthetic. Unfriended tried to introduce us to a new piece of hardware, and even though it was more Zune than iPod, you’re glad it showed up. Sometimes it’s the competitor’s failures that prod the industry toward experimentation. That’s when Unfriended’s “good in concept” ideas become important, actualized innovations.