It’s been discussed elsewhere on the site how, via successive lockdowns and the increasing role of social media, the latter has gone from steadily moving into horror cinema to hitting it at some pace. That being said, Filtered (2021) manages something a little different by taking a social media element which is usually trite and harmless, and making it pretty unsettling. The film begins with a real-time log in, which is momentarily alarming in and of itself if you’re sat at a computer; the girl whose desktop you see, Jasmine (the real name of the actress) clearly needs some down time: message threads open on her desktop show us that she’s having a tough time in work, so she opens Messenger and calls a friend for a chat.
Do people really take their phones to the bathroom? Clearly her friend Marco does, so after the usual, recognisable inane and in her words ‘cringe’ catch-up conversation, he starts playing with filters to cheer her up, and possibly to distract her. Fine. Right? Until the filters seem to take on a mind of their own…
It works well to have this come to us via natural, unscripted dialogue and the actors playing under their own names adds a level of plausibility. Filmmaker Vincenzo Nappi, who has worked exclusively in short film so far in his career, now has a knack of making the most of a very limited amount of screen time and here – as with last year’s First Bite – there’s a definite dash of black comedy, too. That being said, Filtered has a solid pay-off and does manage to make its subject matter, momentarily, very creepy. It’s a decent skit on the ‘new normal’ and a film which would make a good companion piece to a feature of similar subject matter; as time goes on, tech horror is turning into a promising subgenre and Filtered manages successfully to show something innocuous gone rogue.
Filtered premiered at the Cabane à Sang film festival on April 24th 2021.