Read Good Shit On Musings

The movies have always been in love with themselves. For all their heroes and villains, lost loves and epic stories, Hollywood’s greatest source of mythology has always been its own history. Almost from the birth of the medium, movies have explored the filmmaking process and satirized their own development, acting out existential investigations that let the viewer in on the joke while keeping them at arm’s length. By taking place inside the machinery of filmmaking, the narratives seem to offer a glimpse of the “real” Hollywood, but the finished product is still, itself, a movie, and its representation of “reality” is always going to be heightened and enhanced to keep the audience entertained. There’s a constant tension at the heart of these films. The more they try to pull back the curtain, the harder it is to see what’s really behind it.

Hollywood got an early start on self-awareness. Hollywood and Souls for Sale, both silents from 1923, as well as 1928’s silent Show People, are comedies set in the nascent world of film production that are stuffed with cameos from stars of the era. More incisively, there’s 1924’s Merton of the Movies, which originated on Broadway and told the story of an aspiring actor with a penchant for overwrought, hammy acting, so much so that a studio casts him in a comedy but tells him he’s filming a drama. Right there, you’ve got the star-making process, the average person’s thirst for fame, and the duplicitous ways that suits conduct business, all played for knowing laughs. Almost a century later, the story hasn’t really changed.

Yet what’s become so fascinating about these kinds of movies is that as film history marched on, it became possible to fold real films into the fictional narratives, and for actors playing characters to reference other actors by their real names. Little winks like that pop up everywhere — Lauren Bacall in How to Marry a Millionaire talking about “that old fella, what’s his name, in The African Queen”; Cary Grant name-checking Ralph Bellamy in His Girl Friday, in which Bellamy also starred — but they take on new meaning when they happen in movies that are themselves about the filmmaking process. Characters making movies talk about real-world pictures that we, the viewers, have seen. It’s a way to bolster the credibility of their fictionalizations, but it also makes for a pleasantly disorienting experience. Instead of pure suspension of disbelief and pretending that, say, Tom Hanks doesn’t exist in Tom Hanks movies, we watch actors invoke their real-life colleagues in ways that blur reality. The films create a world that might be called Alternate-Universe Hollywood: recognizably our own, yet unavoidably foreign. There are plenty of ways to do this, from the absurdity of Tropic Thunder to the existential dread of The Player, but two comedies from the 1990s stand out for their charm and precision: Get Shorty and Bowfinger. Individually they’re great — funny, quick-witted, entertaining — but they’re also prime examples of how to tell an Alternate-Universe Hollywood story that feels as strong twenty years later as it did the day the print was struck.

Get Shorty was released in 1995, five years after the Elmore Leonard novel that inspired it. The story follows loan shark and film buff Chili Palmer (John Travolta) as he pursues a debtor to Los Angeles and decides to become a movie producer. Like most movies about movies, it’s a love song to the idea of Hollywood-as-dream-factory: Chili’s eyes sparkle when he talks about the classics, and he starts to win over his love interest (Rene Russo) at a screening of Touch of Evil. There are even moments that quote 1932’s Cabin in the Cotton. But modern Hollywood is dealt with more vaguely: while established stars who gained fame in the 1970s and 1980s are mentioned, specific films from recent years are only alluded to in a general way. Take Chili’s pontification on whether he could step in front of the camera: “I can see myself in the parts that Robert De Niro plays, or maybe an Al Pacino movie, playing a real hard-on. I couldn’t see myself in a movie where like the three guys get left with a baby, they don’t know how to take care of it, so they act like assholes.” He’s talking, of course, about 1987’s Three Men and a Baby. But that film was only a few years old when Get Shorty was released, and as a result, bringing it up runs the risk of making the film feel dated, tied to the period in a way that’s ironically less likely to happen by name-checking films from decades prior. It’s partly because classic films have had time to let their reputations grow, evolving into a canon everyone can invoke. Newer films, though, don’t have that luxury.

There’s also a reason Chili doesn’t say the film’s title but does describe its plot. It’s an example of what’s known as distancing language, which is when generalities are used to place a subconscious distance between the speaker and the object in the mind of the audience. It pops up about every week in politics: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” might lack grace, but it still plays better than “I didn’t sleep with Monica.” The phrase “that woman” is a distancing one, and phrases like that manage to simultaneously evoke something specific without actually bringing it all the way into the room. So when Chili all but says “it’s a movie about three men and a baby,” he’s able to call the picture to mind for viewers, but not in such a way that Get Shorty becomes irrevocably linked to it. The film floats along on the surface of its era.

The movies have always been in love with themselves. For all their heroes and villains, lost loves and epic stories, Hollywood’s greatest source of mythology has always been its own history. Almost from the birth of the medium, movies have explored the filmmaking process and satirized their own development, acting out existential investigations that let the viewer in on the joke while keeping them at arm’s length. By taking place inside the machinery of filmmaking, the narratives seem to offer a glimpse of the “real” Hollywood, but the finished product is still, itself, a movie, and its representation of “reality” is always going to be heightened and enhanced to keep the audience entertained. There’s a constant tension at the heart of these films. The more they try to pull back the curtain, the harder it is to see what’s really behind it.

Hollywood got an early start on self-awareness. Hollywood and Souls for Sale, both silents from 1923, as well as 1928’s silent Show People, are comedies set in the nascent world of film production that are stuffed with cameos from stars of the era. More incisively, there’s 1924’s Merton of the Movies, which originated on Broadway and told the story of an aspiring actor with a penchant for overwrought, hammy acting, so much so that a studio casts him in a comedy but tells him he’s filming a drama. Right there, you’ve got the star-making process, the average person’s thirst for fame, and the duplicitous ways that suits conduct business, all played for knowing laughs. Almost a century later, the story hasn’t really changed.

Yet what’s become so fascinating about these kinds of movies is that as film history marched on, it became possible to fold real films into the fictional narratives, and for actors playing characters to reference other actors by their real names. Little winks like that pop up everywhere — Lauren Bacall in How to Marry a Millionaire talking about “that old fella, what’s his name, in The African Queen”; Cary Grant name-checking Ralph Bellamy in His Girl Friday, in which Bellamy also starred — but they take on new meaning when they happen in movies that are themselves about the filmmaking process. Characters making movies talk about real-world pictures that we, the viewers, have seen. It’s a way to bolster the credibility of their fictionalizations, but it also makes for a pleasantly disorienting experience. Instead of pure suspension of disbelief and pretending that, say, Tom Hanks doesn’t exist in Tom Hanks movies, we watch actors invoke their real-life colleagues in ways that blur reality. The films create a world that might be called Alternate-Universe Hollywood: recognizably our own, yet unavoidably foreign. There are plenty of ways to do this, from the absurdity of Tropic Thunder to the existential dread of The Player, but two comedies from the 1990s stand out for their charm and precision: Get Shorty and Bowfinger. Individually they’re great — funny, quick-witted, entertaining — but they’re also prime examples of how to tell an Alternate-Universe Hollywood story that feels as strong twenty years later as it did the day the print was struck.

Get Shorty was released in 1995, five years after the Elmore Leonard novel that inspired it. The story follows loan shark and film buff Chili Palmer (John Travolta) as he pursues a debtor to Los Angeles and decides to become a movie producer. Like most movies about movies, it’s a love song to the idea of Hollywood-as-dream-factory: Chili’s eyes sparkle when he talks about the classics, and he starts to win over his love interest (Rene Russo) at a screening of Touch of Evil. There are even moments that quote 1932’s Cabin in the Cotton. But modern Hollywood is dealt with more vaguely: while established stars who gained fame in the 1970s and 1980s are mentioned, specific films from recent years are only alluded to in a general way. Take Chili’s pontification on whether he could step in front of the camera: “I can see myself in the parts that Robert De Niro plays, or maybe an Al Pacino movie, playing a real hard-on. I couldn’t see myself in a movie where like the three guys get left with a baby, they don’t know how to take care of it, so they act like assholes.” He’s talking, of course, about 1987’s Three Men and a Baby. But that film was only a few years old when Get Shorty was released, and as a result, bringing it up runs the risk of making the film feel dated, tied to the period in a way that’s ironically less likely to happen by name-checking films from decades prior. It’s partly because classic films have had time to let their reputations grow, evolving into a canon everyone can invoke. Newer films, though, don’t have that luxury.

There’s also a reason Chili doesn’t say the film’s title but does describe its plot. It’s an example of what’s known as distancing language, which is when generalities are used to place a subconscious distance between the speaker and the object in the mind of the audience. It pops up about every week in politics: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” might lack grace, but it still plays better than “I didn’t sleep with Monica.” The phrase “that woman” is a distancing one, and phrases like that manage to simultaneously evoke something specific without actually bringing it all the way into the room. So when Chili all but says “it’s a movie about three men and a baby,” he’s able to call the picture to mind for viewers, but not in such a way that Get Shorty becomes irrevocably linked to it. The film floats along on the surface of its era.

Every holiday season, I experience movie-goers PTSD. Im not kidding. My shoulders tense. My breathing quickens. When trailers play, I am struck with anxiety. I have flashbacks. I hear the Pointer Sisters singing and I have visions of a daffy Hugh Grant dancing down the stairs

And then it happens. As inevitable as Jingle Bells playing, yet far more loathsome; the multi-storylined, star-studded ensemble, feel-good movie of the holiday season (MSSSEFGMHS) appears. Theyre virtually interchangeable, like an attack of the clones. They tend to be either love stories or family comedies or both. Either way, Im struck with disappointment. I am baffled by their cloying, plodding return. And then I try to avoid them at all costs.

This began, for me, in 2003. The film: Love, Actually.

Directed by Richard Curtis, best known for writing Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and other British rom-coms. Love, Actually is filled with every clich imaginable. It is insufferably saccharine and seemingly unexpected things that arent at all unexpected happen about every ten minutes.

But Im not writing this piece to tear this one movie down. I don’t want to get too deep into the particular badness of Love, Actually, other than to say that what happens so often is so ludicrous that it plays like farce or a fable. For just one example, Liam Neeson’s character repeatedly talks about how the only girl for him would be model Claudia Schiffer and, toward the end of the film, sure enough, he meets another character, played by Claudia Schiffer!

What’s so flawed about these seeming moments of whimsy or magic or whatever is that the film plays itself as if it is in the real world within the logical rules of the universe. And when it repeatedly diverges from that real world reality, it bursts at the seams. Not only that; theres a central character, played by Bill Nighy, who is an aged, cynical musician who trashes the false sentiments of the holidays as a sort of wink to the audience that the film understands what its doing. And yet the movie drowns in a vat of egg nog of the very same sentiments. The movie is totally schizophrenic.

Which brings me to the point I want to make here. It’s about the identity of a film. Maybe I give them too much credit. But I think of every film as a sovereign being, one that should have that dark night of the soul, the existential moment that we humans have when we ask ourselves, why am I here?

Now, when a Quentin Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson or Steven Spielberg movie arrives in theaters, it knows exactly why its there: because its creator wanted to make it. And if a Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movie comes out during the summer, it also knows why it exists: because Tom wanted it made, to get butts into seats and to make money for Paramount Pictures.

I simplify, of course, but I think you get the point.

Actually, Love, Actually, for all of its flaws, isnt a worthless film. The acting is good, as is some of the writing. Production values are top notch. And it is effective in its ability to pluck heartstrings so well that I couldnt help appreciating it on a more recent viewing. Its putative identity, to be fair, is to tell the story of love. (I can hear violins playing already.) But what bothers me so much is that it fails at its mission. Its not an individual. It is a clone. Or a projection of what it wants to be. Theres no there there.

Every holiday season, I experience movie-goers PTSD. I’m not kidding. My shoulders tense. My breathing quickens. When trailers play, I am struck with anxiety. I have flashbacks. I hear the Pointer Sisters singing and I have visions of a daffy Hugh Grant dancing down the stairs…

And then it happens. As inevitable as “Jingle Bells” playing, yet far more loathsome; the multi-storylined, star-studded ensemble, feel-good movie of the holiday season (MSSSEFGMHS) appears. They’re virtually interchangeable, like an attack of the clones. They tend to be either love stories or family comedies or both. Either way, I’m struck with disappointment. I am baffled by their cloying, plodding return. And then I try to avoid them at all costs. 

This began, for me, in 2003. The film: Love, Actually. 

Directed by Richard Curtis, best known for writing Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and other British rom-coms. Love, Actually is filled with every cliché imaginable. It is insufferably saccharine and seemingly unexpected things that aren’t at all unexpected happen about every ten minutes.   

But I’m not writing this piece to tear this one movie down. I don’t want to get too deep into the particular badness of Love, Actually, other than to say that what happens so often is so ludicrous that it plays like farce or a fable. For just one example, Liam Neeson’s character repeatedly talks about how the only girl for him would be model Claudia Schiffer and, toward the end of the film, sure enough, he meets another character, played by Claudia Schiffer! 

What’s so flawed about these seeming moments of whimsy or magic or whatever is that the film plays itself as if it is in the real world within the logical rules of the universe. And when it repeatedly diverges from that real world reality, it bursts at the seams. Not only that; there’s a central character, played by Bill Nighy, who is an aged, cynical musician who trashes the false sentiments of the holidays as a sort of wink to the audience that the film understands what it’s doing. And yet the movie drowns in a vat of egg nog of the very same sentiments. The movie is totally schizophrenic.

Which brings me to the point I want to make here. It’s about the identity of a film. Maybe I give them too much credit. But I think of every film as a sovereign being, one that should have that dark night of the soul, the existential moment that we humans have when we ask ourselves, why am I here?

Now, when a Quentin Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson or Steven Spielberg movie arrives in theaters, it knows exactly why it’s there: because its creator wanted to make it. And if a Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movie comes out during the summer, it also knows why it exists: because Tom wanted it made, to get butts into seats and to make money for Paramount Pictures.

I simplify, of course, but I think you get the point. 

Actually, Love, Actually, for all of its flaws, isn’t a worthless film. The acting is good, as is some of the writing. Production values are top notch. And it is effective in its ability to pluck heartstrings so well that I couldn’t help appreciating it on a more recent viewing. Its putative identity, to be fair, is to tell the story of love. (I can hear violins playing already.) But what bothers me so much is that it fails at its mission. It’s not an individual. It is a clone. Or a projection of what it wants to be. There’s no there there.

Say an alien visitor to Earth files a formal request for an explanation of the mental processes that compel regular folks to line up and spend their hard-earned money for the privilege of having their wits scared out of them by horror movies. The worlds cinema scholars congregate, form a consensus, and then translate their findings into laymans English. Their answer would be something along the lines of Horror cinema affords the viewer an opportunity to experience fear and its attendant catharsis in a sanitary and safe environment. Being scared is, excuse the obviousness, scary. But the realization afterward, that whats frightening onscreen has no power to do harm in the world beyond the four walls of the theater, is cathartic and even comforting. Maybe theyd even mention the episode of The Sopranos in which psychoanalyst Dr. Melfi compares the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz as apt an expression of purely fictive childlike fear as any to a roller coaster, where the individual can access the sensation of terror secure in the knowledge that hes not in any real danger. Surely the aliens have HBO Go.

Nobuo Nakagawa, the director of the 1960 J-horror masterpiece Jigoku, excels in this mode of horror filmmaking. With vividly imagined gore the likes of which Japanese audiences had never witnessed, Nakagawa painted an indelibly haunting vision of hell replete with severed limbs, blue-skinned demons, and rivers overflowing with gaunt souls of the damned. But in a more meaningful sense, Nakagawa frontloads the most potent, lasting horror in the two acts of the film that precede protagonist Shiros much-vaunted descent into the netherworld. Nakagawa understands that the fears with the power to stay with the viewer for years after the credits roll, the fears that creep up when audiences go to bed later that night and find that they cant sleep, those originate in a different part of the brain entirely. Jigoku has earned its enduring reputation as a cornerstone of Japanese horror because its best frights are existential in nature, not fanciful. The film climaxes with a room full of dead bodies, but the grisliest casualty takes place offscreen. Nakagawa starts with the death of God, and as he goes, so goes the worlds order and decency.

Nakagawas got a knack for conjuring mature-minded scares. Even when he indulges his every dark creative whim in the phantasmagorical hell he creates to torment wayward theology student Shiro (Shigeru Amachi), he tends to root the visible monstrosities onscreen in a decidedly real concern. Though Nakagawa employs surreal means of expressing them, his nightmare scenarios often revolve around covertly commonplace fears that wouldve been intimately known to his viewers. While in hell, Shiros taunted and tortured by the specters of his wife-to-be and their unborn child, the latter of whom leads Shiro on a walking tour of the many realms of hell as he attempts to rescue her. In evoking the images of the dead spouse and child, Nakagawa goes right for the emotional jugular. These images may not be unfamiliar to the folks in the audience, for whom such a situation presents a fate too terrible to envision. To parents, the fearsome element resides not in the ghostly apparitions but the loss that their presence literalizes. The psychedelic atrocities that Shiro witnesses in hell stem from eminently reasonable fears for a right-minded adult to have, which must surely be the worst fears of all.

Say an alien visitor to Earth files a formal request for an explanation of the mental processes that compel regular folks to line up and spend their hard-earned money for the privilege of having their wits scared out of them by horror movies. The world’s cinema scholars congregate, form a consensus, and then translate their findings into layman’s English. Their answer would be something along the lines of “Horror cinema affords the viewer an opportunity to experience fear and its attendant catharsis in a sanitary and safe environment. Being scared is, excuse the obviousness, scary. But the realization afterward, that what’s frightening onscreen has no power to do harm in the world beyond the four walls of the theater, is cathartic and even comforting.” Maybe they’d even mention the episode of The Sopranos in which psychoanalyst Dr. Melfi compares the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz — as apt an expression of purely fictive childlike fear as any — to a roller coaster, where the individual can access the sensation of terror secure in the knowledge that he’s not in any real danger. Surely the aliens have HBO Go.

Nobuo Nakagawa, the director of the 1960 J-horror masterpiece Jigoku, excels in this mode of horror filmmaking. With vividly imagined gore the likes of which Japanese audiences had never witnessed, Nakagawa painted an indelibly haunting vision of hell replete with severed limbs, blue-skinned demons, and rivers overflowing with gaunt souls of the damned. But in a more meaningful sense, Nakagawa frontloads the most potent, lasting horror in the two acts of the film that precede protagonist Shiro’s much-vaunted descent into the netherworld. Nakagawa understands that the fears with the power to stay with the viewer for years after the credits roll, the fears that creep up when audiences go to bed later that night and find that they can’t sleep, those originate in a different part of the brain entirely. Jigoku has earned its enduring reputation as a cornerstone of Japanese horror because its best frights are existential in nature, not fanciful. The film climaxes with a room full of dead bodies, but the grisliest casualty takes place offscreen. Nakagawa starts with the death of God, and as he goes, so goes the world’s order and decency.

Nakagawa’s got a knack for conjuring mature-minded scares. Even when he indulges his every dark creative whim in the phantasmagorical hell he creates to torment wayward theology student Shiro (Shigeru Amachi), he tends to root the visible monstrosities onscreen in a decidedly real concern. Though Nakagawa employs surreal means of expressing them, his nightmare scenarios often revolve around covertly commonplace fears that would’ve been intimately known to his viewers. While in hell, Shiro’s taunted and tortured by the specters of his wife-to-be and their unborn child, the latter of whom leads Shiro on a walking tour of the many realms of hell as he attempts to rescue her. In evoking the images of the dead spouse and child, Nakagawa goes right for the emotional jugular. These images may not be unfamiliar to the folks in the audience, for whom such a situation presents a fate too terrible to envision. To parents, the fearsome element resides not in the ghostly apparitions but the loss that their presence literalizes. The psychedelic atrocities that Shiro witnesses in hell stem from eminently reasonable fears for a right-minded adult to have, which must surely be the worst fears of all.

Picture a film director at work. Once upon a time, the popular image would have been of a man wearing jodhpurs and an oversized hat, sitting in a canvas chair with a megaphone in his hand. Action! Nowadays, the generic look runs to backwards baseball caps and gigantic headphones slung around the neck, and our director (still mostly men, sadly) is more likely to be peering intently at a monitor than shouting instructions. In both cases, though, what springs to mind is the classical shooting process: assemble cast and crew on set or location; decide where to put the camera initially and whether or not to move it from that position during the shot; guide the actors through as many takes as necessary; that’s a wrap.

As anyone who’s ever worked on a movie knows, the above is only a tiny (albeit crucial) aspect of the director’s job, which begins well before principal photography starts and continues long after it ends. “Director” is just a less pompous-sounding synonym for “Orchestrator,” which would really be more accurate. Even a tiny, low-budget film requires hundreds of creative and practical decisions to be made, and while many of those tasks can be delegated, one person (theoretically) is the final arbiter, weighing in on everything from costumes and props to script notes and camera lenses. Consequently, much of what a director does is essentially invisible. At the very least, it’s difficult to ascertain just by watching the film.

The recent horror movie Unfriended makes that more starkly clear than any movie I’ve seen in ages. My gut feeling is that the film is brilliantly directed, by a Georgian-Russian filmmaker named Levan Gabriadze. But it’s hard to say for sure, because few of the usual associations we make with movie directors at work apply in this particular context. Even after watching and reading multiple interviews with Gabriadze (and with the film’s screenwriter, Nelson Greaves), it’s not clear to me how much of Unfriended was shot and how much was more or less created in post-production. Nor am I sure that the distinction matters.

Unfolding in real time, the film takes place entirely (save for the last five seconds) on the screen of a laptop belonging to a young woman named Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig). Early on, Blaire accepts a Skype call from her boyfriend, Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm), and she eventually winds up simultaneously Skyping with four other friendsas well as the vengeful ghost of a classmate, Laura Barns, who committed suicide after being bullied. The plot is silly, but the technique is astounding. If it were just a bunch of kids yammering at each other in Skype windows (and it becomes that in the second half, unfortunately), it would stilll be pretty impressive, given all the opportunities for things to go wrong. But Unfriended goes much further than that. It’s a movie in which the protagonist, for all intents and purposes, is a cursor.

Right from the beginning, Gabriadze and Greaves (and notice that here, already, I feel compelled to credit both of them, because I’m not at all confident about stating who did what) are remarkably willing to risk alienating viewers. Blaireor, rather, Blaire’s Cursoropens multiple applications throughout that hide her friends from viewthough one face is often partially visible at the edge of the screen, just to keep us alert and paranoid. The Skype windows are consistently obscured, for about 10 minutes straight at one point, in a film that’s barely 80 minutes long. She pulls up Facebook, YouTube, iMessage, Spotify, Gmail, her Chrome history, various websites. And she uses all of those apps exactly the way people use them in real life. When she wants to hear music, we watch as she goes through her playlists (“June playlist,” “lovey shit,” “partayzzzz”), selects one called “rando,” and then clicks on a particular song, which is thankfully not Imagine Dragons’ “Every Night,” clearly visible. But the truth is I’ve never heard that song, so I just now switched over to Safari and pulled up the song’s video on YouTube, and while listening to make sure it’s bad enough for that joke to play, I made a different joke on Twitter (using a dedicated app called Janetter) and quickly checked my email, which for some reason I still do via a UNIX shell, and then I realized that my iMac screen for the last couple of minutes looks exactly like Unfriended. Minus the friends.

(Also Jesus Christ that song is terrible. May I never hear that again.)

Obviously, this would get tedious in a hurry were it not expertly paced, and Gabriadze keeps things moving briskly. Or maybe he just instructed whoever’s handling Blaire’s MacBook to keep things moving brisklyagain, I’m not sure how much of this is post-production wizardry. Plus, most of what Blaire’s Cursor does is at least tangentially related to the narrativeshe’s messaging privately with Mitch about the dead girl, or looking up creepy posts on unexplainedforums.net (not an actual site). But the verisimilitude, especially for Mac users, is off the charts. At one point, Blaire tries to stop whoever’s harassing themusing the dead girl’s Facebook accountby informing Facebook that the account’s owner is deceased, and we watch in real time as she goes through what appear to be all of the actual steps involved in memorializing a Facebook account, including providing a link to an online obituary. By multiplex standards, that’s almost avant-garde (the whole sequence is silent, except for clicking), and it’s topped later by a ticking-clock horror scenario in which Blaire needs to trash a file but temporarily can’t empty her trash because she keeps getting a pop-up alert that says “The operation can’t be completed because the item ‘sample-saturday.night.live.s39e02.miley.cyrus.hdtv.x264-2hd2.mp4’ is in use.”

I’ll say that again: This is a horror movie that wrings suspense from the question of whether a person using a MacBook Pro will figure out, in the nick of time, which application is using a downloaded torrent of a Saturday Night Live episode hosted by Miley Cyrus. And it’s not even the actual episode! It’s a sample!

If you want a sense of what Unfriended looks like, it looks like this:

Picture a film director at work. Once upon a time, the popular image would have been of a man wearing jodhpurs and an oversized hat, sitting in a canvas chair with a megaphone in his hand. Action! Nowadays, the generic look runs to backwards baseball caps and gigantic headphones slung around the neck, and our director (still mostly men, sadly) is more likely to be peering intently at a monitor than shouting instructions. In both cases, though, what springs to mind is the classical shooting process: assemble cast and crew on set or location; decide where to put the camera initially and whether or not to move it from that position during the shot; guide the actors through as many takes as necessary; that’s a wrap.

As anyone who’s ever worked on a movie knows, the above is only a tiny (albeit crucial) aspect of the director’s job, which begins well before principal photography starts and continues long after it ends. “Director” is just a less pompous-sounding synonym for “Orchestrator,” which would really be more accurate. Even a tiny, low-budget film requires hundreds of creative and practical decisions to be made, and while many of those tasks can be delegated, one person (theoretically) is the final arbiter, weighing in on everything from costumes and props to script notes and camera lenses. Consequently, much of what a director does is essentially invisible. At the very least, it’s difficult to ascertain just by watching the film.

The recent horror movie Unfriended makes that more starkly clear than any movie I’ve seen in ages. My gut feeling is that the film is brilliantly directed, by a Georgian-Russian filmmaker named Levan Gabriadze. But it’s hard to say for sure, because few of the usual associations we make with movie directors at work apply in this particular context. Even after watching and reading multiple interviews with Gabriadze (and with the film’s screenwriter, Nelson Greaves), it’s not clear to me how much of Unfriended was shot and how much was more or less created in post-production. Nor am I sure that the distinction matters.

Unfolding in real time, the film takes place entirely (save for the last five seconds) on the screen of a laptop belonging to a young woman named Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig). Early on, Blaire accepts a Skype call from her boyfriend, Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm), and she eventually winds up simultaneously Skyping with four other friends—as well as the vengeful ghost of a classmate, Laura Barns, who committed suicide after being bullied. The plot is silly, but the technique is astounding. If it were just a bunch of kids yammering at each other in Skype windows (and it becomes that in the second half, unfortunately), it would stilll be pretty impressive, given all the opportunities for things to go wrong. But Unfriended goes much further than that. It’s a movie in which the protagonist, for all intents and purposes, is a cursor.

Right from the beginning, Gabriadze and Greaves (and notice that here, already, I feel compelled to credit both of them, because I’m not at all confident about stating who did what) are remarkably willing to risk alienating viewers. Blaire—or, rather, Blaire’s Cursor—opens multiple applications throughout that hide her friends from view…though one face is often partially visible at the edge of the screen, just to keep us alert and paranoid. The Skype windows are consistently obscured, for about 10 minutes straight at one point, in a film that’s barely 80 minutes long. She pulls up Facebook, YouTube, iMessage, Spotify, Gmail, her Chrome history, various websites. And she uses all of those apps exactly the way people use them in real life. When she wants to hear music, we watch as she goes through her playlists (“June playlist,” “lovey shit,” “partayzzzz”), selects one called “rando,” and then clicks on a particular song, which is thankfully not Imagine Dragons’ “Every Night,” clearly visible. But the truth is I’ve never heard that song, so I just now switched over to Safari and pulled up the song’s video on YouTube, and while listening to make sure it’s bad enough for that joke to play, I made a different joke on Twitter (using a dedicated app called Janetter) and quickly checked my email, which for some reason I still do via a UNIX shell, and then I realized that my iMac screen for the last couple of minutes looks exactly like Unfriended. Minus the friends.

(Also Jesus Christ that song is terrible. May I never hear that again.)

Obviously, this would get tedious in a hurry were it not expertly paced, and Gabriadze keeps things moving briskly. Or maybe he just instructed whoever’s handling Blaire’s MacBook to keep things moving briskly—again, I’m not sure how much of this is post-production wizardry. Plus, most of what Blaire’s Cursor does is at least tangentially related to the narrative—she’s messaging privately with Mitch about the dead girl, or looking up creepy posts on unexplainedforums.net (not an actual site). But the verisimilitude, especially for Mac users, is off the charts. At one point, Blaire tries to stop whoever’s harassing them—using the dead girl’s Facebook account—by informing Facebook that the account’s owner is deceased, and we watch in real time as she goes through what appear to be all of the actual steps involved in memorializing a Facebook account, including providing a link to an online obituary. By multiplex standards, that’s almost avant-garde (the whole sequence is silent, except for clicking), and it’s topped later by a ticking-clock horror scenario in which Blaire needs to trash a file but temporarily can’t empty her trash because she keeps getting a pop-up alert that says “The operation can’t be completed because the item ‘sample-saturday.night.live.s39e02.miley.cyrus.hdtv.x264-2hd2.mp4’ is in use.”

I’ll say that again: This is a horror movie that wrings suspense from the question of whether a person using a MacBook Pro will figure out, in the nick of time, which application is using a downloaded torrent of a “Saturday Night Live” episode hosted by Miley Cyrus. And it’s not even the actual episode! It’s a sample!

If you want a sense of what Unfriended looks like, it looks like this: