Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
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.
Unfriended is genuinely innovative in its screenlife format — the entire film takes place on a laptop screen, with Skype, Facebook, and browser tabs as the visual language. This was a fresh, singular formal conceit at the time of release and earns high Novelty. The cinematography (if you can call it that) is cleverly executed within its constraints, making the interface itself expressive. However, the plot is fairly thin — a standard vengeful ghost premise dressed in a new format — and the characters are thinly drawn archetypes whose secrets feel melodramatic rather than genuinely disturbing. The acting is uneven; the performers handle the awkward screenlife format with varying degrees of conviction. The ending delivers a cheap jump scare rather than a satisfying or thematically resonant conclusion, undercutting the film's more interesting ideas.