'Unfriended' lags more than it clicks

"Unfriended," a horror thriller from the Russian producer-director team of Timur Bekmambetov and Leo Gabriadze, is part of a long, proud tradition of visual gimmickry pressed into service on behalf of a genre, from the seemingly unbroken single take of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" and Robert Montgomery's subjective camera in "Lady in the Lake" to the poly-platformed "Project X."

Here, Gabriadze gives a relatively ho-hum revenge plot an extra jolt by presenting it entirely in one take, in the form of a multitasking Skype session between six friends who are maliciously threatened by a mysterious anonymous avatar.

Presumably, the humanoid-shaped eminence grise knows what they did last summer. And, as "Unfriended's" unsavory back story unspools, it turns out what they did wasn't nice at all. As chief protagonist and audience surrogate Blaire (Shelley Hennig) frantically tries to IM, email, Google, Facebook and YouTube her way out of impending doom, viewers watch all the pinging, dinging, toggling and buffering as if they were looking over her shoulder, images appearing and collapsing in now-pixelated, now-lagging stutter steps.

The conceit works, until the headache-inducing visuals - punctuated by manic flurries of terrified clicking and dragging - make viewers want to call the Help Desk.

The pretty, fresh-faced Hennig makes a convincing damsel in distress, even when she utters: "What's a troll?" Her co-stars possess the kind of bland SoCal good looks of many young actors; the cast member who makes the deepest impression is the wonderful Jacob Wysocki.

Here, Wysocki provides essential comic relief in a story that otherwise adds little to the crop of scary movies morbidly obsessed with the torture and early demise of hyper-sexualized adolescents. The not-so-subtle subtext of Nelson Greaves' script for "Unfriended" is that cyberbullying is bad, but the filmmakers' overriding interest is in jacking up the suspense to make the blurrily filmed whammies land with any kind of palpable oomph.

They succeed, sometimes. Finally, by a wacky third act twist involving Chatroulette (remember Chatroulette?), the ludicrousness of the plot seems less like a bug than a feature. At times, "Unfriended" really clicks - but ultimately, it's a drag.