Like the brief relationship it portrays, Unfriend’s gut-punch emotional impact depends on just how unexpected its final trajectory is. The pitch builds slowly but with geometric progression, climaxing in an affective register that almost belongs to another genre entirely. The near-final scene would be a total cliché if it weren’t so entirely earned and so seamlessly, devastatingly perfect. I’m worried (really quite anxious) not to oversell the film, to create expectations when it depends so much on surprise. The surprise of this film is just how ambitious it is, how unhurried its characterizations are, surreptitiously setting up backstory that it patiently waits to pay off, how little self-regard the actors betray, never playing the subtext in their emotionally complex performances, how totally the script avoids spelling out its themes, staging a dialogue between its leads that’s of such unpretentious philosophical resonance that you don’t quite realize how exacting it is until long after you’ve seen the movie. There is a last-act revelation captured with ethnographic and empathetic precision in which Jonathan (Angelo Ilagan) and David (Sandino Martin) learn they’re connected in a way that neither had realized. Unfriend (Solar Entertainment, Center Stage Productions, BeyondtheBox, Inc., 2014) is a film of constant anxiety and agitation. In other words a pretty fair approximation of the teenage mindset. Joselito Altarejos works wonders with crisply framed takes and two astonishingly sincere and nuanced performances. This is a film full of languid moments which are transformed by the context into instances of discovery and revelations of personality. David's outsider status is emphasized by the casting of Martin in the role. As the film wears on and David’s desperation to collapse his divided worlds into one becomes more acute, Martin’s almost ethereal difference becomes intrinsic to our understanding of the character.
Unfriend looks even better, with a high definition transfer that near-perfectly reproduces Altarejos and cinematographer Arvin Viola's visual whirlwind of texture. The monochromatic scenes that open Unfriend are striking, with deep blacks and brilliant whites, evocative of early 1960s New Wave. Where Viola comes into his own, though, is the way he captures dingy rooms, kitchens lit with bare fluorescent bulbs and low-light nighttime exteriors. Colors are saturated, contrast is pumped and everything looks more real than real. The film's grain structure is fully intact, there's no evidence of digital manipulation of any kind and clarity is exceptional. While not as drastic an improvement as the picture quality, the film's soundtrack gets a significant bolstering thanks to a strong 2-channel mix. The sound design and overall clarity seem somewhat limited by the on-location source recordings, but acoustically there's a nice sense of place and the effects are clean. Voices can occasionally be overwhelmed by the chaos of their surroundings, but most of the dialogue is perfectly mixed. With Unfriend, Altarejos is rapidly becoming a crucial portraitist of the fragility of youth.
Screenplay: Zigcarlo Dulay
Director of Photography: Arvin Viola
Musical Scorer: Richard Gonzales
Film Editors: Zig Dulay, Joselito Altarejos
Production Designer: Lester Jacinto
Sound: Don San Miguel, Andrew Milallos
Director: J. Altarejos
