Before I start it should be said that this film is better the less you know about it; so I’m not going to give too much away. You will just have to trust me.
The film is a documentary or ‘reality thriller’ which follows Nev Shulman as he creates a relationship with a family he meets online. His friend Henry Joost and his brother Ariel Schulman film the entire thing; Nev develops an email correspondence with an 8-year-old artist called Abby after she paints one of his published photographs. Through emails, phone calls and Facebook Nev soon gets to know the rest of Abby’s family, whom he jokingly dubs ‘The Facebook Family’. Nev even begins to have some sort of romantic involvement with Abby’s teenage sister Megan. Since this all happens online and over the phone, the whole audience can tell it won’t end well no matter how sweet it may at first appear.
There has been a lot of debate about whether this film is actually ‘real’ or just a marketing ploy. At one end of the spectrum, the stars suggest it is authentic while some critics claim it is a complete fake or somewhere in the middle with parts of it being genuine footage while the rest is a dramatisation of real events.
The film is well put together and uses a lot of computer imagery (Google Maps, Facebook and SatNav) to bind the scenes together, which gives everything a more interactive feel. What brings the film down in my opinion, however, is the ‘mind-blowing’ ending which severely lacks a ‘boom’. I was waiting for my mind to explode throughout the entire 87 minutes and then upon realising the big climax had already happened, I felt a bit put out. If this is a genuine documentary, then I suppose this is understandable: perhaps it is admirable that the ending was carefully handled and not made into something more shocking and less heartfelt. However, I still felt disappointed that my mind had not been blown, as promised.
