Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Unfriended: Dark Web Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman January 22, 2021

With the sound of the Mac startup chime, Unfriended: Dark Web begins its fully online, digitally transmitted, and reality bending journey through some of the darker corners of the Internet where paid entertainment takes a turn for the macabre -- and deadly. Writer/Director Stephen Susco, who wrote the hit Horror film The Grudge, follows up on the similarly structured 2014 digital screen P.O.V. film Unfriended with a tighter and more chilling film in which a laptop thief, and his friends on video chat, fall into a rabbit hole of criminality, money, perversion, and murder. The film doesn't break new ground that its predecessor didn't previously explore, but Susco works the formula to its fullest, fully morphing the worst of humanity and the worst of technology into a wild and horrifying dive into digital darkness.

Matias (Colin Woodell) and Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras) are stumbling through a relationship. She’s deaf, but there’s an app for that, and it’s one of Matias’ own making. But maybe it’s him who isn’t hearing her. When he’s trying to work out some kinks via FaceTime, the call with Amaya is disconnected. He instead switches over to virtual game night with his friends who are impressed with his picture quality; it’s obvious he’s joining them from a computer with more power and a better camera. But his chat session continuously receives weird messages on his screen from someone he doesn’t know..perhaps the laptop’s true owner? Matias tells his friends he bought it cheap off Craigslist but the truth is that he stole it from the lost-and-found bin at his place of employment. With the messages flooding the screen and his gradual realization that the computer’s drive is packed full of spy cam footage and snuff films, he and his friends find themselves in both a moral quandary and a very real digital terror when it’s learned that the laptop belongs to someone who is part of a secret underground “dark web” sect that commits crimes on livestream for money, and Amaya is their next target.

The cyber realm is a natural fit for contemporary Horror. So much of life is lived online anymore that the days of the road trip terror in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or the analogue slashing of Halloween and Friday the 13th where cell phones and security cams would more than likely render the killing spree finished almost as quickly as it starts might play quaint in 2021. But there's a biting, real-world edginess here, and as the story spirals and the real and digital intersect, it becomes a horrifying exercise in worst case scenario 21st century criminality. Far flung? Maybe. More likely than a masked maniac wilding a chainsaw, butcher knife, or machete and getting away with it umpteen times? Absolutely.

What makes the movie work so well is the ease of surface flow and the slow untangle of believable webs below the digital surface. The characters, and Matias in particular, are tech-savvy but not gifted hackers. They are quick on the digital draw, capable of pulling up terminal, switching apps, copying and pasting, and sifting through information at great speed and accuracy, but they are always playing catchup to the cyber criminals who have their own secure workarounds and, at least early on, control the flow until Matias gets a firmer grasp on what's going on and what -- who -- he is up against. As the stakes are raised on both sides both Matias and the criminal to whom the laptop belongs find they have everything to lose when Matias' interruption becomes a disruption becomes an eruption of real-life and digital chaos that quickly spirals out of control and angers the overseers at the top. The film gradually explores the larger network, the big money, and serious criminality at play. It's not the first film to focus on the rich preying on the vulnerable for sport and entertainment, but it might be the most believable (fans of this film should also check out Trust, another film with a similar foundation but a more traditional cinema layout).

Unfriended: Dark Web Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Unfriended: Dark Web takes place entirely on the computer screen. The picture quality is essentially like looking at a high definition monitor for 90 minutes. Various windows pop up, chunky videos chug along, real-time live chats play out, and so forth. All of the graphics are appropriately sharp; there's no missing the fine edge details on menus and buttons. Text is crisp. Videos range in quality but they are meant to replicate an Internet stream, not a sharp and fluid motion picture. Colors are firm and bright, particularly Facebook blue, the familiar Apple spinning pinwheel, and other various buttons, but much of the movie is black text and dark window borders against a bright white or gray background. Video clips looks fine for basic Internet saturation, though some of the deliberately chunky ones and the noisier low end resolution clips obviously have their own innate parameters limiting output quality. There's no obvious shimmering or aliasing or the like. For what it is, it looks just fine.

Unfriended: Dark Web Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Unfriended: Dark Web's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack is surprisingly active and impressive considering it's supposed to take place entirely on a computer screen and, presumably, through computer speakers (though one of Matias' friends on the chat shows off his new speakers, which do support one of the strongest sound outbursts in the movie). While one might think that greatly amplified sound might ruin the illusion, the opposite is in fact true. Potent one-off sound elements of a variety of sources -- digital, pixelated sounds surge through the speakers at the 41-minute mark during a live-streamed attack; some large metallic sounds reverberate through an empty warehouse at the 37-minute mark even as the scene plays out on a low-res video feed -- bring a heightened sense of dread and terror and even momentary confusion, amplifying not just audio but the terror its underscores. The track even finds some mild ambience, such as when the boat sails through the River Styx as if from a scene out of Minecraft. Dialogue accuracy is impressive, too, with only narratively intentional flubs and flaws getting in the way of center-based output perfection.

Unfriended: Dark Web Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Unfriended: Dark Web includes several alternate endings (possible spoilers follow!) in a supplement entitled Alternate Endings: Who Deserves to Live? (1080p). There are three different endings available: Matias & Amaya (5:30), Matias (7:52), and Amaya (7:03). A Movies Anywhere digital copy code is included with purchase. This release ships with an embossed slipcover.

Unfriended: Dark Web Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Unfriended: Dark Web is a pleasant surprise. Here's a "Horror" movie, sequel to a film that essentially did everything this one does already, that makes something that would have been experimental and abstract just a few years ago into a mainstream Horror/Thriller with honest scares and chills based on far-fetched but not overtly unrealistic events. The movie is tight, well paced, and effective at both telling its story and scaring its audience, not to mention raising alarm bells about the darker side of the Internet, and humanity, too. Universal's Blu-ray delivers quality video and audio and includes a trio of alternate endings. Recommended.