Unknown user

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Movie
German title Unknown user
Original title Unfriended
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2014
length 83 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 14
Rod
Director Levan Gabriadze
script Nelson Greaves
production Timur Bekmambetov
Nelson Greaves
camera Adam Sidman
cut Parker Laramie
Andrew Wesman
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
Unknown User: Dark Web

Unknown User (original title: Unfriended , working title: Offline , festival title: Cybernatural ) is an American horror film from 2014 . Directed by Levan Gabriadze .

The film premiered on July 20, 2014 at the Fantasia International Film Festival . In the USA the film opened in cinemas in April 2015, in Germany on July 16, 2015.

The entire film takes place on the desktop of the protagonist Blaire Lily's laptop .

In 2018 a sequel was released with Unknown User: Dark Web .

action

On April 12, 2014, six school friends from Fresno, California met in a Skype conversation. Her classmate Laura Barns committed suicide exactly one year earlier . Laura had previously been massively bullied online after getting drunk at a party and ending up in her own feces . A video of her crash was shot and anonymously uploaded to YouTube , with a request to Laura to commit suicide.

In the chat, Blaire first meets her boyfriend Mitch, whom she promises her first sex for the prom . Jess Felton, Ken Smith and Adam Sewell join the chat later. In addition, a user with the name "billie227", unknown to friends, logs on. They try unsuccessfully to remove the unknown user from the chat. At the same time, they receive messages from Laura Barns' account via Facebook . They suspect that Laura's friend Val Rommel is having a bad joke with them. You then invite Val to the Skype chat. At the same time, embarrassing pictures of Val appear on Jess's Facebook profile at a party where she vomits and smokes marijuana . Val then accuses Jess of deliberately uploading these pictures. Jess claims to be innocent and deletes the pictures, but they reappear shortly afterwards. After Jess can finally delete them, the same pictures appear on Adam's account. Text messages follow in the chat in which it appears that Jess and Val are insulting each other, whereupon the argument between the two escalates. After Val is massively threatened online by Laura's account, she accuses computer savvy Ken of having something to do with it, and then logs out of the chat to call 911 and report a death threat. Ken ignores her accusation. Val just says that Laura got what she deserved.

The friends then receive a message from Laura's email address with an Instagram link that shows an email in which Laura asked Val a year earlier to delete the embarrassing video and be friends again. In her reply, Val refuses and writes Laura that she should kill herself. After various Instagram users abuse Val for her cruelty, she logs back into the chat. The friends see Val in her bathroom, next to an open bottle of bleach, staring at the webcam . The friends think they are only seeing a still picture, but when Blaire calls Val, they see the phone vibrate on the bathroom cabinet. Suddenly her laptop is knocked down and the friends only hear the arrival of the police who responded to the emergency call. Using the police radio code, they find out that the police officers have reported a suicide. Then the webcam is switched off.

Laura sends more pictures to the friends. Some show Blaire and Adam having sex. Shortly afterwards, the friends see in the unknown user's Skype video that he is behind one of the friends. They quickly realize that this is Ken's room. Shortly afterwards his camera shows image disturbances and then Ken is attacked by something invisible. First, his hand is chopped up in a stand mixer before destroying the blender's glass container and the exposed blades slicing open his neck.

The unknown user then forces the four friends to play "Never have I" and says that the loser will die. Numerous embarrassing secrets of the four friends are revealed in the game. Jess said behind Blaire's back that she had an eating disorder. Blaire was drunk in an accident in Jess's mother's car. Mitch kissed Laura even though he was with Blaire. Mitch betrayed Adam for selling marijuana to the police. Jess stole $ 800 from Adam. Adam freaks out at this revelation and asks Blaire in-game if she's still a virgin. They both had sex, even though Mitch wanted to have the first sex with his girlfriend. The unknown user then uploads a sex video of Blaire and Adam to YouTube as evidence.

Mitch, now also enraged, reveals Adam's secret that he gave roofies to a girl at a party and then raped her while she was unconscious. He then forced his victim to have an abortion . Blaire and Adam receive messages on their printer, but they don't want to show them. Mitch grows angrier because he believes Blaire and Adam are exchanging secret messages on their printers. He then wants to log out of the chat. The unknown user threatens to kill Mitch immediately. Under extreme stress, Blaire shows her printed message: "If you show this message, Adam will die." Adam, who had taken his father's gun for protection, was forced by a force to shoot himself in the face with it. His paper from the printer falls in front of the camera and the friends read on it: "If you show this message, Blaire will die."

The game continues after Adam's death. The user wants to know who defaced Laura's grave. Jess doesn't want to admit it was her. This will turn off the lights in your entire house. Jess is hiding in the bathroom. Desperate to find help anywhere, Blaire uses Chatroulette to do it . After many unsuccessful attempts, she finally finds someone who calls the police. The video of Jess suddenly stops, shortly afterwards she can be seen screaming and you can see her esophagus being burned with a straightening iron .

Blaire and Mitch apologize to each other, thinking it's all over now. But the unknown user writes to them and wants to know who uploaded the embarrassing video of Laura's party crash. Laura writes a message to Blaire on Facebook and wants to know who it was. Blaire writes back that it was Mitch. Mitch then presumably stabs himself in the eye with a pointed, elongated object and dies. Blaire is left alone in the chat.

The user thanks Blaire for her help. But there is one thing that Blaire has to admit. A longer version of the embarrassing video is uploaded to Blaire's Facebook account, and in the end Blaire is seen as a laughing camerawoman. Blaire apologizes, but her Facebook profile is inundated with hateful comments blaming Laura's death. The unknown user writes to Blaire that she wishes she could forgive her. Blaire sits in front of her screen in shock. You can hear the door of her room opening, hands close the laptop and, for a split second, the face of Laura's ghost.

Cinematic peculiarities

The film is played on a Mac OS desktop for almost the entire duration . Only in the last few seconds does the viewer see the plot through the eyes of the protagonist Blaire Lily .

reception

The film received mixed reviews. At Rotten Tomatoes , 61% of reviews are positive out of 121 reviews. On Metacritic , the film scores 59 out of 100 based on 30 reviews.

The film service said the film was “[z] initially original and exciting”, but would “soon itself become a victim of its limited perspective” and was “giving away its concept, increasingly lacking in ideas, in favor of a conventional genre story”.

FSK approval

After the film had been approved for ages 12 and over in June 2015, it was re-evaluated by the FSK in October 2015 . As a result, since October 6, 2015 , Unknown User has only been approved for people aged 16 and over.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Release certificate for unknown users . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , October 2015 (PDF; test number: 152 489 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for unknown users . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ Unfriended. In: Rotten Tomatoes . Retrieved July 7, 2015 .
  4. ↑ Unfriended. In: Metacritic . Retrieved July 7, 2015 .
  5. ^ Unknown user. In: Filmdienst , 14/2015. Retrieved July 7, 2015 .
  6. ↑ First release certificate for unknown users . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry, June 2015 (PDF)