Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco)
In Zadie Smith’s 2016 novel Swing Time, the main character offers a backhanded compliment of certain b-tier Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers films, asserting that “the story was the price you pay for the rhythms.” Perhaps at my grumpiest I would’ve taken umbrage with that statement, but I think it’s an assessment that can be applied to Levan Gabriadze’s 2014 film Unfriended and its new sequel, Stephen Susco’s Unfriended: Dark Web. The two films are above all examinations in form, removed from their experimental trappings and provided global distribution. As such, Dark Web remains indebted to certain banal, universal truths in service of its genre, but communicates its ideas in novel, perpetually intriguing ways. What certain Astaire and Rogers’ films may have lacked in narrative sophistication they made up for with the finesse and rhythms of their physical performances. The “performance”, as it were, at the center of Dark Web is one of ocular empathy, where, contained on a desktop, the movement of every mouse click, collapse and minimization of a window, and the flickering of a cursor is given tactile depth.
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