Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

The screenlife horror picture returns with a stolen MacBook and a game night that curdles into a live-streamed execution. Stephen Susco, directing for the first time, keeps the camera inside the monitor, a clever cage and a tiring one. The cast is assembled with a diversity that goes largely unremarked, which is to its credit: Betty Gabriel, Savira Windyani, and Stephanie Nogueras, a deaf performer playing the deaf girlfriend Amaya, bring lived texture to a genre that usually settles for interchangeable screamers. The sign language exchanges fold into the format with real ingenuity, typing and signing competing for the same small window. A lesbian couple sits among the friend group, present and unbothered, though the film has no interest in them beyond their usefulness as a body count.

Cryptocurrency and the dark web are where the ambitions thin out. Bitcoin is a plot device, a sum to be extorted, not a lens on wealth or power. The cybercriminals are monsters with hobbies, and the screenplay treats them as such. There is no argument here about capital, only about bandwidth. The women in the ensemble are competent, and one drives a subplot, but nobody is making a case about gender. The racial mix of the group is simply the racial mix of a group. These are thriller mechanics, and they function well enough once the swatting begins.

Deafness is a sensory condition, not neurodivergence, so the film earns nothing on that ledger. Body positivity is absent; the trepanation imagery runs the opposite direction, toward the skull as a place where things go wrong. Climate concerns never appear. History is not revised, because there is no history here, only a server. The film gestures at surveillance and the dark web as timely subjects, then loses interest and returns to the screaming, which is the honest choice. A minor entry in a minor franchise, competently assembled and moderately cruel, content to be a haunted house with a webcam.