You know what? Its really not.
If you check out the trailer or read the synopsis, you may get bad deja vu and recall back to a time when you watched The Den. Its in a similar vein, but a completely different direction. (Also, if you havent seen The Den, dont bother.)
Levan Gabriadze and Nelson Greaves manage to take a premise that sounds completely contrived and turn it into a slick, fast-paced thriller that shows off the twisted side of human nature more than the somewhat downplayed supernatural aspect of the movie.
Six friends are a week away from prom and after seeing Blaire (Shelley Hennig, Teen Wolf, Ouija) and her boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm) nearly strip down to their birthday suits, we are introduced to all six of the friends. Greaves did a good job at diversifying the group while subtly fitting them into the one-note tropes we are used to seeing, although he never makes it blatant: Adam (William Peltz) is the douchebag rich kid, Jess (Renee Olstead) is the slut, and Ken (Jacob Wysocki) is the tech nerd stoner. They begin to get trolled by a mysterious source that claims to be a dead student that slowly reveals inner group secrets throughout the night.
The stereotypes are never shoved down our throat but instead made more believable by keeping the dialogue and their actions realistic, pretty much throughout the entire movie. While the mysterious guest forces themselves into their Skype sessions, Facebook messages and Gmail accounts, the friends rapidly descend into backstabbing and name calling as the night gets more and more violent. Thats where Greaves and Gavriadze succeed over and over again. Though they could have easily started shoving moral messages about the dangers of social networking and our dependence on the internet, the never do. Instead they use it as a vessel to quickly and successfully involve us in a story they want to tell. The viewer is absorbed because we do everything that the characters are doing everyday of our lives. Shelley Hennig does a great job, easily the most believable out the entire crew. Her range of emotions is wide and none of her reactions seem forced or over the top. It would be easy to see her as a top notch scream queen. Thats not to say that the other actors dont have their moments. Peltz and Wysocki are instantly likeable and have some of the most realistic exchange of dialogue thats been seen in a teen scream.
There are a few missteps along the way. Later on in the movie, some of the internet gags get old and even a little silly. A number of the lines are laughably bad, which arguably plays into the believability of the dialogue, and not all of the actors really hit their mark. The supernatural part of the movie is almost nonexistent, save for a few solid kills and a shoehorn reentry in the third act, but it doesnt really affect the overall flow and feel of the film.
What could have ended up as an overall disaster ends up being far better than it really had any right to be. The crew made this possible by building a taut thriller for the modern world without slipping in any obtuse social agenda and instead focusing on realism and tension. With believable dialogue and the creation of multiple antagonists, one a malevolent spirit and the others some teens with malicious tendencies, Cybernatural is a solid entry into the found footage genre.
