A year after the death of a fellow student who jumped off the balcony of a school building when a video of her detailing her sexual assault at her hands of her father is circulated around the school, the seven people responsible are haunted by her ghost via a video chatroom.
The ghost forces the friends to confess their deep, dark secrets to each other, and slowly kills them one by one if they fail to comply until it uncovers the truth of who was responsible for spreading her terrible story.
Terrible is such a great word to use to describe this movie. There are a few movies like this - lazy movies where half of the time we are just staring at a video chat or Facebook post on the screen while the characters are talking. Unlike films like Unfriended (which this film is clearly based on) or The Samejima Incident, this film at least tries to build some interesting sets and uses flashbacks to tell the side stories - but the core of the film is still the same. And it’s just boring.
Heads up: this review is going to contain some spoilers as I feel I need to discuss how ridiculous the ending is and why it makes the whole movie utterly pointless.
There is a theme with movies I really dislike - they all seem to focus on the digital or online world. I don’t like Pulse because I find it incredibly slow and boring and the I don’t like the Thai film Viral due to the stupidity of the script and how it assumes young people interact within the digital space.
In my opinion, horror movies based around the online digital world just can’t be done properly. They’re just so damn boring.
That leads us to this film. Even though it was released in 2018, it took half a decade for this to get a streaming release, and after spending 90 horrendous minutes with it (it was actually longer, I kept pausing the movie often to do other things that it probably took me around 2 hours to get through it) I can see why it took so long - although to be honest I have seen much worse movies.
Let’s start with some positives, because there are some. The movie has a good-looking cast - which is almost expected at this point. I don’t recognise any of them, and reading though some of their profiles, they didn’t do much after this film was released.
I’ve mentioned it already, but the sets are nice in this film too because they’re all very specific to the characters and are used to build their personas. The rich characters have nice rooms, while the poorer characters look a bit slovenly. Hilariously one of the characters appears to live in a tattoo parlour!
But even the sets betray the atmosphere that the movie is trying to create. Why? Because they’re very clearly sets built and filmed in a sound stage. Some of the bathrooms and bedrooms used in the movie are massive and lay out wise, make very little logical sense. Also, why is one of the girls spending her whole damn time in the bathroom instead of moving to another more comfortable part of her house?
Sets are the least of this movie’s issues though. It’s the story that really stinks. Logically it makes sense - as much as a ghost movie can. The seven friends are being taunted by the ghost to reveal their darkest secrets: one of them is bisexual, another has slept with one of the boys and fallen pregnant, while another one sells her body to her teachers for high grades.
There is a theme here, and it almost always seems to revolve around sex. Specifically, how bad sex is for young people. I assume there was a hidden religious motive behind this.
For those who get annoyed with censorship in their movies, I need to warn you that I am not sure what’s going on in this film. You may have watched some pinku Japanese films in the past and noticed some optical blurring during sex scenes. Something similar happens here, but instead of blurring they’ve gone with heavy mosaics. It’s ridiculous, because the whole point of the movie is that these friends are sharing steamy and scandalous videos of each other - so I doubt they would mosaic them and hide any of the details in them!
I don’t expect nudity or graphic sex in an Indonesian movie, but I also don’t except to see screens full of mosaics either considering some of the content in other movies like Sugar Mill or even KKN In The Dancers Village!
And now for the spoiler. And it’s less of a spoiler and more of a rant about what this whole stupid movie is trying to find out.
The ghost in the movie is trying to work out which one of the seven of these friends had the idea to leak the horrible story about her rape and pregnancy by her father to the whole school. And this is where the illogicalness of the movie falls apart. When the ghost asks them all - they all flat out refuse to admit anything. Even after one of their friends is killed on screen, they still refuse to say anything.
When we get down to three survivors, it’s only then that the person responsible for uploading the content admits to what he did! He waited until 4 friends were brutally killed before doing it. Bear in mind, at this stage they’re all still denying they know anything about it.
Then, in a scene that defies belief, we see that not only was there the guy who uploaded the content, but one of the other girls told him to do it, while three of the other friends stood around laughing at it! So, five of the seven of them knew all about it and could have ended this whole thing at the start of the movie by just admitting to what they did.
And by doing that they could have saved the lives of their friends.
But then, we wouldn’t have gotten the ending that we ended up with. And quite frankly, I loved the end. Because they all died. They all deserved to die.
And that made me happy. No, I am not a psycho. I promise.
GENRE Horror
DIRECTOR Amar Mukhi
STARRING Yuniza Icha, Harris Illano, Wendy Wilson
ORIGINAL TITLE Aib #Cyberbully
ALTERNATIVE TITLE Shame: Cyberbully
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN Indonesia
RELEASE DATE 2 August 2018
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.