Unfriended: Dark Web's reviews
Media reviews
Vanity Fair
'Dark Web' works as a dumb, thrilling horror movie, even if filled with the usual buffet of twentysomething archetypes, movie-hero hubris, cringeworthy romance, and a villain whose mysterious ability to make Facebook messages disappear feels suspiciously convenient.
Indiewire
The script lacks bite, save some wry meta-commentary on the movie?s existence (including a passing reference to ?horror transmedia?). Nevertheless, Susco follows the well-worn path of using the horror/thriller genre to explore the eerie ambiguities of modern times.
The Playlist
'Unfriended: Dark Web' isn?t afraid of hinting at some truly unsettling stuff, and it?s all the more troubling given (some of) its plausibility. The result of watching this shouldn?t just be staying off the dark web; it should be chucking your laptop and all other devices ? after you?ve destroyed all your data and cleared your cache, of course.
New York Times
What?s striking in this movie, apart from an ostentatiously glitchy screen distortion that occurs whenever a denizen of the ?dark web? appears on one of the screens within screens, is how credibly its extreme trolling plays.
Variety
'Dark Web' skates by on saturated nastiness, one terrific kill, and the audience?s engagement in seeing if the filmmakers can pull off the stunt. Barely, but it?s fun to watch them try.
The Guardian
Even if some of the late-stage plotting seems sloppy and increasingly preposterous, there?s a callousness to the brutal last act that, together with the far patchier, yet similarly hard-edged First Purge, feels like a definite product of the time we?re in, as war on terror-era torture porn did in the mid-2000s.
The Verge
'Unfriended: Dark Web' has enough snark, shock, and disregard for anyone?s emotional comfort to briefly confuse viewers into thinking it?s pulled off something worthwhile. But when it?s done, it?s easy to walk outside feeling like you?ve spent 90 minutes doing nothing at all.
The Hollywood Reporter
Susco's plot gets harder to buy by the minute; as a first-time director, he doesn't get much out of his cast; and boy, does this Screenlife gimmick grow thin quickly. While this technique ? which they claim is harder to pull off, in technical terms, than it looks ? could be useful in some contexts, it's hard to ignore the mountain of contrivance required to use it for an entire film.