Unfriend­ed: Dark Web

You can buy any­thing on the inter­net if you know where to look. Drugs, guns, the nas­ti­est of video nas­ties – it’s all there, nes­tled away beneath the sur­face but ulti­mate­ly with­in reach of any­one with the stom­ach and deter­mi­na­tion to go dig­ging around. Acces­si­ble only through a spe­cial peer-to-peer brows­er, the dark web caters to a more dubi­ous clien­tele than your aver­age web­site (one of its claims to fame is host­ing noto­ri­ous under­ground drug mar­ket­place Silk Road until the FBI shut it down in 2013). It was only a mat­ter of time before some enter­pris­ing film­mak­er decid­ed to make this mys­te­ri­ous cor­ner of the inter­net the sub­ject of a hor­ror film.

A stand­alone sequel to 2014’s Unfriend­ed, Unfriend­ed: Dark Web fol­lows the famil­iar found footage for­mu­la, and is the lat­est in a series of techy thrillers debut­ing this year (dubbed ​‘screen­life’ and includ­ing forth­com­ing films Pro­file and Search­ing). Osten­si­bly nor­mal twen­tysome­thing Matias (Col­in Wood­ell) acquires a new Mac­book in order to work on a soft­ware project for his deaf girl­friend Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras). In the process of doing so, he stum­bles upon some dis­turb­ing footage left on the lap­top by its pre­vi­ous own­er. Matias and his pals quick­ly become embroiled in a sadis­tic plot involv­ing a creepy online syn­di­cate called The Cir­cle, who get their kicks stag­ing online ​“red rooms” (Google it, if you’re so inclined).

Admit­ted­ly, the film is an improve­ment on its super­nat­ur­al pre­de­ces­sor, as there are few things as scary as the sheer bru­tal­i­ty which human beings are capa­ble of. The vil­lain of this gory tale is greed in one form or anoth­er, which moti­vates both the good guys and the bad guys to act in appalling ways. Even so, these gim­micky screen-based tales offer very lit­tle in terms of styl­is­tic free­dom – with all the action play­ing out in brows­er win­dows and web­cam dis­plays, the onus is on actors to do some damn fine act­ing, and no one in Unfriend­ed: Dark Web man­ages to do very much at all apart from shout and cry. It’s hard to feel sym­pa­thy for any of them, and past the 30-minute mark their inevitable gris­ly fates actu­al­ly start to come as a wel­come relief.

The plot itself isn’t beyond the realms of pos­si­bil­i­ty, though it’s sil­ly and need­less­ly nasty all the same. As always seems to be the case, women come off worst in this sadis­tic ver­sion of real­i­ty. Vio­lence against women in hor­ror films is noth­ing new, but in this case one does have to won­der what exact­ly the inten­tion is behind the film­mak­ing. What is direc­tor Stephen Sus­co try­ing to tell us? The inter­net is bad? That tech­nol­o­gy has ush­ered in new cru­el and unusu­al ways to be cru­el to oth­er peo­ple? Any­one with a Twit­ter account will already be ful­ly aware of the net’s capac­i­ty for good and evil.