In this post I’ll be review the film Catfish. So if you haven’t watched it yet I suggest you stop reading, the less you know about this film the better. Not that I think anyone outside the class is reading this but I suppose you never really know the internet and its invisible audience.
For me this film was completed new, I had never heard people talking about it or seen any trailers or reviews, which was lucky. At first I thought it was a romcom then a horror and toward the end it spiraled into something completely different.
Filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman documenting Ariel’s brother Yaniv ‘Nev’. The film begins with a photographer Nev collaborating with an 8 year old girl Abby (a perfect example of online collaborations and its capabilities). She sends him paintings of his photographs and befriends him on Facebook along with her family, mother Angela and half sister Megan (his “Facebook family”) and a few of their friends.
With this a relationship him and Megan begins to blossom, chatting online via text, calling each other and she sends him some of her music, which he then discovers is not actually hers. Subsequently starting an exploration on the extent of her ingenuity.
The three set of on a trip to her house to meet them face-to-face. Arriving they first become aware that Angela looks totally different to her online persona. And spirals on to the truth of her being all the people on Facebook, painting ‘Abby’s’ pictures and pretending to be Megan all along. With this a deeply saddening story of her life unfolds and wipes out any feelings of anger that the viewer holds because of the extent of her deceit.
It is a compassionate story of technology and psychology. How people can use the Internet to portray any personality traits and create a completely different online persona. And how certain human circumstances can change people feelings.
Whether this film is a true story is irrelevant.
No comments:
Post a Comment