They’re dragged into it by one stupid guy who makes a series of stupid choices, and by the time the movie is over we realize that, even then, it took about a million coincidences to make the killer’s evil scheme possible in the first place. The characters in Unfriended: Dark Web aren’t trapped in a world of terror. But in the Unfriended it’s an excuse for talking heads to shout at each other, make foolish choices, and fall prey to a cynical, immature narrative which confuses contrived hopelessness for some sort of existential dread. Unlocking its secrets is, at least in theory, a scary idea for a horror story. Which is a shame, because the real-life Dark Web is a frightening concept, filled with illicit criminality and grotesque human behavior. By the time Matias is getting real-time dating advice from a serial killer while he’s trying to make nice to his girlfriend via Skype, it’s hard to take Dark Web seriously. The situations in Dark Web are often unbelievably silly, and highly specific. In real life those situations might not be scary, but at least we can appreciate that they would be off-putting and weird.
But those were everyday online situations with universally understandable functionality. As if that wasn’t silly enough, later on he gets pulled “across The River” and - GASP! - the graphics are suddenly high-resolution! RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! The original Unfriended relied on superficially silly concepts too, like Facebook posts that won’t delete, and friends you can’t block. Matias discovers an online space called “The River,” for example, which turns his desktop wallpaper into an animated underground canal with graphics right out of the original Wolfenstein.
In practice, Unfriended: Dark Web consists of laughable scenarios. Play At least, that’s what the film is going for. Before long, they find themselves trapped in one horrifying scenario after another. But the further Matias and his friends fall down the online rabbit hole, the harder it is to crawl out again. He’ll do anything, and kill anyone, to get it. Matias has stolen a laptop from a serial killer who sells videos online, and before long the killer has figured out what’s going on, and he wants the computer back. 960 gigabytes are hidden away, in a folder he cannot delete, and when he finally finds the file and opens it… it’s full of snuff films. Unfriended: Dark Web stars Colin Woodell (Unsane) as Matias, a programmer who steals a laptop from the lost and found at work, and discovers - while in the middle of an online game night with his friends - that the hard drive is full. Instead of a story about how we interact online, it’s a story about cardboard twenty-somethings stumbling onto a murder cult in a convoluted story that relies on more on coincidences than logic. The sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web, takes the visual gimmick from the original film and removes all the relevancy.
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