Metacritic reviews

When the genre-film spectacle arrives, it's in full force, and the strictures of the framing device manage to amplify, rather than suppress, the impact of the shocks and scares.

Director Levan Gabriadze is adept at the sinking something's not right creepiness too few horror films dig into. His techniques are certain to be copy-pasted by imitators.

Unfriended commits to its idea and continually finds new ways to creatively exploit it, building the tension as each character reveals his or her own dark deeds, thus justifying the brutal vendettas visited upon them.

What kind of a movie takes place entirely on one screwed-up teen's computer screen? That would be Unfriended, a creep-you-out experiment in terror that damn near pulls off every trick up its cyber sleeve.

Though not particularly ground-breaking — last year’s Elijah Wood-starring Open Windows pulled the same trick, and much more ambitiously — we’re still going to “like” the result.

It's obvious that they're aiming for something more fun than genuinely haunting, and it helps that there is a good deal of humor used to punctuate the horror. It doesn't all land, but there's a fair amount of wit in something as simple as watching what someone types, deletes, then retypes.

Simultaneously clever and exasperating, the film puts a novel spin on the genre Roger Ebert dubbed “the Dead Teenager Movie.”

For everything here that’s new and exciting, there’s much that’s way too familiar. The kids are so one-dimensional and unpleasant, it’s hard to care once they start dying off.... Unfriended is often more innovative than scary, too, with some memorable but not particularly chilling and hilariously foreshadowed death scenes.

Unfriended is sometimes a blast to watch and is occasionally funny and unnerving, but by its conclusion it becomes screechy and overwrought.

In the end one would rather be back at one's own computer, tending to the tedious details of digital life, than watching this clique get pinged to death.