Director: Michael Dupret
Year: 2022
Country: Belgium
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Trying to build her brand, a burgeoning social media influencer comes across a viral challenge and sets about involving her friends in the series of pranks to initiate her new brand, but when she starts to find that the demonic influence has corrupted her life tries to stop it from spreading.
Review:
This was a decent enough if problematic genre outing. One of the better elements of this one is a rather fun setup involving the intriguing downfall of her life over social media. With the opening setting up the idea of this particular circle of friends quite nicely as well as getting the central idea of their influencer lifestyle, the brief bits here set up the gradual reveal of something dark and dangerous happening to her with the incident at her house where she gets fooled by the prank by the stalker that sets this firmly in motion towards genre territory. As that provides a slew of interesting attempts at suspense later on with the inability to determine if the series of freaky visuals, distorted videos, and perceived conversations she overhears that signal the release of something demonic and otherworldly upon her and her friends. This is all decent and vicious enough to bring about some positive points here.
There are some big issues here that do bring this one down. The main overarching issue with this one is the massively topical expose on the plight of modern social media influencer culture that isn’t in the slightest bit interesting. As the people here show themselves to be every stereotypical bit of phone-obsessed teenagers who are more concerned with getting more followers and attention for their posts, bring about an insane desire to film themselves doing everything imaginable regardless of the context of the situation, or showcase an irritating feature of engaging in the most vapid form of cool slang use as a means of engaging with each other, this runs throughout the film as a whole and never once allow anything to mean more to them than being glued to their phones. This is all immensely difficult to give much care towards and causes the group to be quite hard to get into.
The other big drawback to this one is the lackluster pacing which really hampers this one quite a bit. Focusing quite a bit on the exploits of their social media platforms, their own personal relationships, and trying to make sure they’re not going crazy that the film doesn't have as much interaction with the demon as you’d think there would be. It’s mainly restricted to a small section in the final half where everything starts to go wrong and the idea of something demonic happening begins to build in earnest but it’s way too late for that to happen since the film is nearly over by the time we get any kind of demonic activity, much less an explanation for what’s happening. Despite the idea making some semblance of a plausible outcome, it is broached so late that it’s hard to matter as the dull pace prevents it from going full-on with the concept. These factors all conspire heavily to bring this one down.
Overview: **/5
An intriguing if a wholly problematic account of modern influencer culture, this one has some worthwhile moments here to be somewhat worthwhile even though the detrimental factors are quite egregious. Those who don’t mind the drawbacks or are curious about the subject matter will be the main targets here while most others should outright avoid this one.
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