Spree

At the risk of age­ing myself slight­ly, there’s a song I remem­ber being pop­u­lar when I was about 19. ​‘Inter­net Friends’ by the Aus­tralian elec­tro-house duo Knife Par­ty is a cau­tion­ary tale about cyber stalk­ing, and cul­mi­nates in the line ​“You blocked me on Face­book, and now you’re going to die”. This came to mind while I was watch­ing Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Spree, about a dis­il­lu­sioned twen­tysome­thing who seems dead-set on fame at any cost. Nine years lat­er, our col­lec­tive anx­i­ety around the poten­tial fall­out from the preva­lence of social media shows no sign of abating.

Kurt Kun­kle (Joe Keery) is a stream­ing obses­sive with viral­i­ty on his mind. All he wants is to be the next stream­ing sen­sa­tion; while he osten­si­bly works as a dri­ver for the pop­u­lar ride-share app Spree, it’s real­ly just a means to pro­duce more con­tent for his chan­nel. The car is rigged with cam­eras and he livestreams trips with his pas­sen­gers in hopes of catch­ing some good mate­r­i­al for ​‘Kurt’s World’. Most­ly, he’s just trolled by Bob­by, a kid he used to babysit who has become a pop­u­lar prankster on social media. Real­is­ing he needs to up the stakes if he’s going to get noticed, Kurt decides to get a lit­tle more cut-throat in his approach. Things quick­ly take a turn for the murderous.

Giv­en Kurt’s all-con­sum­ing desire to stream, it makes sense that Kotl­yarenko employs the ​‘screen­life’ gim­mick which has found pop­u­lar­i­ty in recent years thanks to the likes of the Unfriend­ed films. Of course, Covid-19 has made audi­ences even more accus­tomed to sit­ting slack-jawed in front of their lap­top or mobile phone; one of the big viral hits of 2020 was the video con­fer­enc­ing hor­ror film Host, filmed dur­ing lock­down. But a gim­mick is still a gim­mick, and it’s a pleas­ant sur­prise that Kotl­yarenko man­ages to link togeth­er YouTube videos, Insta­gram posts, livestreams and screen­shar­ing in an authen­tic but gen­uine­ly enter­tain­ing way.

It helps that his lead actor is a mag­net­ic pres­ence. Even when play­ing a char­ac­ter who seems to have crawled out of the deep­est, dark­est depths of Red­dit, Keery is charis­mat­ic enough to eas­i­ly car­ry the film, which wise­ly doesn’t take itself too seri­ous­ly and recog­nis­es the inher­ent absur­di­ty of our cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal moment with­out feel­ing too much like it’s rail­ing against The Youth Of Today. It wouldn’t work with­out Keery, who man­ages to flip from dorky wannabe to Patrick Bate­man-esque psy­chopath on a moment’s notice.

If there’s sup­posed to be some sort of social cri­tique at play amid the ris­ing body count, it gets lost among the mash-up of gen­res and styl­is­tic con­cept. Plen­ty of killers have com­mit­ted atroc­i­ties in the pur­suit of fame, so Kurt is hard­ly unique – if any­thing, it feels as though the film is reluc­tant to make his moti­va­tions too com­plex. Pre­cious few of us need remind­ing that there are some incred­i­bly dark cor­ners of the inter­net out there, where blood­sport is very much alive and well, but Spree feels more inter­est­ed in send­ing up the Logan Pauls and Shane Daw­sons of the world than delv­ing into the annals of actu­al extremism.

It does, how­ev­er, make a com­pelling case for being nicer to your Uber dri­ver; every pas­sen­ger Kurt encoun­ters is unpleas­ant, to the extent you can almost under­stand his homi­ci­dal rage. What Spree doesn’t quite seem to realise, how­ev­er, is that it could also tack­le the exploita­tive nature of the rideshare econ­o­my. Instead, the film is too fix­at­ed on its ​‘fame at all costs’ satir­i­cal bent.