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AFRAID (2018)
Directed by Jason Goldberg
Written by Nick Kreiss
Starring Alanna Masterson, George Byrne, Luke Baybak
THE WALKING DEAD’s Alanna Masterson stars as the object of everyone’s eye in the security cam found footage thriller AFRAID—a not so typical found footager.
A couple takes a romantic vacation in the woods not knowing that the cabin has been decked out with security cams by an offscreen creeper. Allana (played by Alanna Masterson) plans on making this vacation their last as she is about to move to college, leaving her boyfriend George (George Byrne) miles away. To complicate things more, Allana cheated on George with some dude a while back when she visited the college. Meanwhile, the creeper has hacked into Allana’s phone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and just about every other social media accounts that the kids use these days, threatening to destroy Allana’s life.
In this day and age where social media seems to be all important, I guess AFRAID is going to strike a chord with someone. This is sort of a morality tale warning people not to put their lives online like they do every day. Allana’s addiction to her phone and all of its wonderful apps is bound to be familiar to the audience this film is speaking to, so most likely the danger of having one’s life hacked is going to strike feel in those types of people. Still, the stakes are quite low here. While the stalker is creepy in the way he is able to manipulate Allana into believing she is talking with her new boy toy or best friend behind her boyfriend’s back, there is no clear way of knowing if this is just a guy who wants to kill her or masturbate into her panty drawer.
It’s also very hard to sympathize with Allana who is pretty much a despicable human trashfire who cheats on her boyfriend and talks incessantly with her new boyfriend and best friend online about how difficult it is going to be to break up with him. Seeing her fight with George and then immediately text her new guy is some shallow and wretched behavior. Maybe this type of behavior is common in real life, but casting your protagonist as being a cheater and liar makes it really hard to empathize with them once the bad things begin to happen. Masterson does a decent job in the lead, despite the horrible things she does. She is front and center here the whole time and is able to carry the movie. The mystery as to who Allana’s stalker really is isn’t really that hard to figure out as there are only three people in this film. Still, director Jason Goldberg juggles the screenshots decently, flipping from computer screens to camera screens rapidly.
In the end, AFRIAD is just not for me. It feels as if it is made with a moral code and mentality that is foreign to me. Does that make me a grumpy old man or a hyper-moral prude? I don’t know. I just like to actually like the protagonist in a horror film and I surely didn’t feel that way in AFRAID.
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MLMILLERWRITES / MLMillerFrights 
I think for most movies to work, the audience has to care about the main character to some extent because, if not, then it doesn’t really matter what happens to them. I kind of had the same problem with Happy Death Day – the main character wasn’t very likeable so I didn’t really care how many times she was murdered. I guess she becomes a better person through the experience and maybe that’s a point of the movie but at the same time, she was a fairly hateful person which made it hard for me to connect with the suspense.
I’m in the minority, but I never liked Pulp Fiction for mostly the same reason – nearly everyone in that movie was fairly despicable and I cared nothing about what happened to the characters. I guess there are some slasher movies where a large number of people are murdered, but those movies usually end with one character being chased and trying to fight back and those characters are usually somewhat likeable.
Thanks for your review. Think I’ll skip this one as it also doesn’t sound like my cup of tea, but then again, maybe I’m also a grumpy old man as well 🙂
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Totally agree. I think the only exception to the rule for me is THE DEVIL’S REJECTS as Rob Zombie actually made me feel for the horrible Firefly family in the end. I am not proud of it, but I did.
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