WARNING: SPOILERS AHOY!
“Private life is public knowledge”
New Years Eve, and a group of College friends get together for a party to send the year off. Outside, however, a mysterious pandemic grips the globe turning people crazed and violent. As a means of defence they barricade themselves inside, but as the night drags on and the virus claims more and more lives, how safe can they stay?
Seeing as it’s Cody Calahan’s feature film début as director, he knows how to put the thing together. It has real movement to it, he obviously understands how to keep pace and it’s visually solid, a stand out being when the characters are introduced by their social networking profiles. There’s also some sparse yet really grand gore and shocks to be found here, which is key to a body horror like this. Besides this, it suffers from all the problems most low-budget horror films of its type do; fluctuating script quality, average acting, arbitrary tension. However, it’s Antisocial‘s main theme that puts meat on its bones; what if the internet was literally viral?
While there are comparisons to be made with films like The Crazies and 28 Days Later, the most obvious parallels to be drawn are between Antisocial and the films of David Cronenberg (and not just the whole Canadian thing). Like Videodrome or eXistenZ, Calahan takes an abstract idea and realises it in flesh, showing all its grotesque horror. However, unlike these films, it displays to us an argument without conclusion. Cronenberg’s films feel like they are a part of a dialogue, confronting and pondering the modern age with scepticism. Antisocial is more a cynical, didactic statement with a feeling of no real thought behind it. For me, it needs to be a scathing dissection of the way we interact with the internet, but it’s more like your friend getting annoyed at you for checking your emails on your phone.
Although I don’t necessarily agree with the films anti-Internet age message, I’m not sure that the film fully does either. It seems to be bashing our reliance on technology, but the characters use technology to better their situation, keeping up with the outside world and trying to make sense of the virus. Technology is both the damnation and the saviour. So if not all of the internet is bad, it’s just sites like facebook, which, for me, undermines any relevant point the film might be trying to make. Any problems that society may have with technology is larger than just social networking, and without strength behind its thematic focus, what we’re left with is a capable, if not run-of-the-mill, horror flick.
There are some really strong moments to be found amidst the exposition and clichés. While mildly thought provoking if you haven’t seen horror films like it before, it lacks the development of its core idea needed to be poignant. Antisocial is worth a watch for the set pieces, just don’t take its message as seriously as it seems to.
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