UNFRIENDED: Hyperlink Theatre

This review was requested by Marcus Michelen. Many thanks to Marcus for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Levan Gabriadze
Writer: Nelson Greaves
Cast: Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Matthew Bohrer, Renee Olstead, Jacob Wysocki, Courtney Halverson, Heather Sossaman
Runtime: 83 mins.
2015

In the late 1800s Sigmund Freud made the revolutionary claim that hysterical symptoms are not rooted only in the physiological, but issue from trauma undergone at some point in the past. Hysteria is a social disease, and must be dealt with on psychosocial terms. These studies in hysteria would unlock his theories of repression and the unconscious mind, thus inventing the framework for an entirely new understanding of the human personality. Freud argues that human behavior is never surface level; it is shrouded from ourselves by ourselves. Our pathologies exist at the nexus of personality and patriarchy, body and politic.

Today we understand that the condition Freud's contemporaries called "hysteria" was a cobbled together mass of quackery and convenient sexism. Freud's work redefines hysteria as a pathological snag in the relationship between our conscious and unconscious mind. Trauma displaces desire, and hysterical symptoms tattletale on the parts of our mind that we don't have access to. It is the job of the analyst to circumvent a patient's denial of that trauma by closing the narrative circuit.

I am invoking Freud's work to better discuss Unfriended, which is an unprecedented work in its own right. So unprecedented that it may be the only feature film of the 21st century so far to invent an entirely novel way of telling stories. I have yet to hear a term for the medium pioneered here, so I call it Hyperlink Theatre. With one ignorable exception, the entirety of the film takes place within the interface of the protagonist's computer display. We follow Blaire (Shelley Hennig), more specifically Blaire's cursor, as she clicks around social media and talks to the floating Skype heads of her friends. No edits, and arguably no 'cinematography,' as the filmmakers cannot adjust the camera, only futz with the 'production design.'

In the year of our Lord 2020, the innovation on display here might fail to wow us. These plaguey days, theatre has made an awkward transition to a similar style of floating head Zoom storytelling out of necessity. Not to mention the meteoric rise of Twitch, a new medium that has rewired our brains so much that it makes Unfriended's unique interface seem pedestrian. At the time, though, this film came as a blistering insight.

So what is it that we see? Best to start by talking about the core storytelling unit of Hyperlink Theatre: the cursor. Unlike a typical film but much like a first person novel, the subject and the curator are collapsed into one. All edits are made by Blaire herself cycling between different windows. What this means is that our visual tableau is an expression of the character's desire, not just the cinematographer's. We are seeing what Blaire herself wants to see.

This works beautifully as a manifestation of choice. Whenever Blaire becomes desperate, she overclicks broken links. When startled, the fluidity of her screen navigation stumbles. When afraid, the cursor hovers over the link that must/mustn't be clicked. This technique is responsible for an impressive generation of tension by proxy. When her boyfriend isn't responding to her urgent iMessages right away, we too wait anxiously for those three blessed dots to pop up. On the flip side, when Blaire is desperately doing research or watching an important video and her boyfriend's message notifications keep popping up on the sidebar, our anxiety rises from too much activity rather than the lack of it.

For when we navigate the virtual realm, we are navigating our projections and fantasies. You could even go so far as to consider the personal computer a bionic extension of our very selves. Unfriended may sacrifice control by relinquishing the cinematic tools that other movies have at their disposal, but that's part of the point. This new medium allows us to explore characters via their digital constellations of flotsam. Blaire's open tabs become a referendum on abandoned trains of thought. Her desktop icons a map of her desires. The way she constantly swaps between private and group correspondence a dissection of her focus as well as her allegiances.

That last one is a great example of the way this new medium warps how characters communicate, as well as our level of access to that communication. Blaire writes, and rewrites, and edits, and rewrites sensitive messages. Accessing that rewriting process opens insight to her unconscious mind's workings that we wouldn't have if we were simply seeing the final product. Communication becomes a journey. Just so with the hyperlinks that Blaire navigates. Hyperlinks are a unique information threshold, one that encourages user agency in the form of a binary decision. To click or not to click? The Click is designed to be satisfying, addicting. Our desire impels us to follow the hyperlink trail deeper and deeper. Unfriended exploits this to create a feeling of inevitability. All links lead to Rome.

This is a ghost story, ultimately, and the ghost is the self that we project into the digital space. More literally, the ghost, victim, and antagonist here are all the same: Laura (Heather Sossaman). After a life-shattering video of a drunken Laura gets shared on YouTube, the cyber bullying becomes too much and she commits suicide. The film takes place one year after her death, and it is no coincidence that on this day Laura's defunct Facebook profile begins sending ominous messages to Blaire and company...

The film has cyber bullying on its mind, which couples nicely with its expression of self in a digital space. Social media encourages us to tamp down gnarly memories through selective (and algorithmic) curation. In a way, Laura is like the Freudian analyst. As Blaire experiences pathological symptoms in the form of escalating tech malfunctions that shouldn't be possible, Laura chides Blaire that this could all be over if she just admits to herself and the world what she did. It isn't Laura's ghost that rips apart this friend group. She's just the catalyst for their own guilt and anxiety to resurface.

I've made this movie sound tremendously interesting, which is a disservice to any potential viewers out there. What could have been an entrancing formal experiment collides with a piss poor choice of subjects: a bunch of white yuppie sociopaths that nobody could possibly care about. Unfriended may have a lot of interesting moving parts, but it is devoid of merit when it comes to dialogue and drama. This horrid, unlikeable bunch are par for the course as far as bad slasher movies go. It defies sense that a film could be so ingenious in its form and so poopydiapered in its content, but here we are.

That's a lot of words to say that Unfriended is both totally worth watching and completely useless. If you can stomach the shallow idiots yelling pointless garbage at each other over Skype, you'll find the ingredients for worthwhile art to come. In the meantime, we can use Unfriended to have more interesting thoughts independently about the ghosts that inhabit technology and the way virtual spaces offer an arena for our conscious and unconscious minds to grapple.

1.5 / 5  BLOBS