I never thought Unfriended would work as a concept. You can base an episode of Modern Family around a Skype call; you can’t make a horror movie using the same aesthetic. Except you can! Turns out that what you actually can’t do is make a sequel to that movie, at least not if you’re going to do that whole “real life horror” thing in the Trump era of online hacking chicanery and malfeasance. Unfriended: Dark Web isn’t fucking scary. It’s tense! That works out okay for a while. Over time the tension dissipates, because artistic license aside, the stuff of this movie is too damn normalized, if not in headlines than in the growing canon of online urban legends. Yawn. Good for me overall, though, because it means I got a new piece in Polygon, which I encourage you to click.
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