This review contains spoilers.
CW: Suicide
The name Hideo Nakata might not be immediately recognisable to everyone, but I’m sure you’ve heard of his iconic 1998 horror Ring. Yes, the girl crawling out of the TV and scaring the living bejeezus out of you Ring. I consider that film to be an absolute masterpiece, an intriguing mystery-thriller that turns into an unforgettable horror. You might be wondering what relevance this has to today’s topic – unless you are intimately familiar with the rest of Nakata’s filmography, including the 2010 internet thriller Chatroom. This film features an iconic cast of British it-kids: baby-faced turns from Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Imogen Poots, Hannah Murray, Tuppence Middleton, and future Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya, et al. You KNOW they mined the cast of Skins for talent. But an iconic cast does not an iconic film make, and it is quite abundantly clear why this oddity has faded into obscurity. What is more baffling is why the hell Nakata even made this film in the first place.
Chatroom follows William (Taylor-Johnson, giving a performance halfway between Heath Ledger’s Joker and a bad GCSE drama piece), a troubled teenager who starts an online chatroom called “Chelsea Teens!” (the exclamation mark is discussed at length). This attracts a group of equally messed-up youths who start to circle around William, but he sets his sights on one in particular: Jim (Matthew Beard), who is depressed and blames himself for his father leaving him at London Zoo as a child. Also possibly because he fumbles goth mommy Tuppence Middleton in Cyberdog (shame!) But William’s intentions are not supportive; instead, he has a very normal pastime: baiting children into committing suicide! Soon the teens are all in his grip, and his male manipulator game begins.
Straight out the gate, Nakata makes a bold choice by representing the internet as a saturated, Wes Anderson-paletted series of endless corridors, splitting off into literal chat “rooms” where the teens meet virtually. It’s a neat enough idea, and makes more sense when you know Nakata adapted the film from a play by Irish writer Enda Walsh. You can imagine the online conversations playing out dynamically on stage. But on film, it doesn’t translate quite as well and immediately feels extremely dated. The design is also weird as hell – why would the internet be piss yellow and teal? The blown-out look makes every actor look jaundiced whilst on the ‘net, and they contrast this by – get ready for a shocking, never-before-seen idea – making the real world grey and desaturated! Wow! The various chatrooms shown are universally ugly: Eva’s (Poots) room is adorned with a square pink bed and photos of herself; another room is just a load of men bullying a child; a third has hospital-style translucent drapes and a lone TV playing child suicide videos. The dialogue in the chatroom scenes is also really stilted, which I thought might be a creative choice – until it turned out to be just as dodgy in the real world sections. It’s not the only film to portray the internet as a physical setting, but it’s certainly a… unique interpretation.
Behold, the internet!
The teens are also very… special. William himself is obsessed with making twisted stop-motion animation, which is shockingly extremely good (in contrast to everything else in this film). Laika should’ve snapped him up before… well, we’ll get there. Eva is a model and is jealous of her friend Ushi, so William kindly offers to help – by circulating fake revenge porn and editing Ushi’s headshots. Talk about a real friend! Emily (Murray) is upset that her parents don’t give her enough attention, so she starts acting up by smearing shit on their car, as one naturally does. Meanwhile Mo (Kaluuya) is attracted to his friend Si’s (Jacob Anderson) 11-year-old sister. William convinces him there will be no problem with telling Si about this crush, which goes just about as well as you’d expect. But the film hardly desires to take a stance on things like Emily’s clear mental health issues or Mo being a straight-up paedophile, and as soon as these storylines are vaguely resolved they are basically forgotten about. They seem like edgy window-dressing for the main plotline, as William continually increases his baiting of Jim until he promises he can get him a gun if they meet in London Zoo. At his wits’ end, Jim agrees and sneaks out (not very hard considering his mother, despite her son’s previous suicide attempt, sees no issue with him locking himself in his room. Great parenting!)
The peak of 2010s internet fears: being unflatteringly photoshopped by a twatty teenager.
Eva, Emily and Mo finally meet IRL and pursue William and Jim to the zoo. There is a wonderfully absurd moment where Emily finds Mo in Charing Cross Station with a sandwich board that reads “Emily This Is Mo” – I love a choice that really makes you ask, what, when, how, why? Jim retrieves the gun and goes to kill himself in the London Zoo toilets, as depressing a location as you can imagine. We return to the Internet world to see William goading Jim, begging him to kill himself, to the point where he… kisses him… on the lips… what? There had been some noticeable homoerotic tension, but I wasn’t expecting it to FULLY go there? I guess that awakens something in Jim and he decides life is worth living, so he leaves the bathroom of doom. But William is hot on his heels and they finally have their first in-person meeting. Sadly, instead of getting straight down to it and fucking by Camden Lock, they fight until the police arrive; before they can arrest him, William falls backwards into the path of an oncoming train, and Londoners spend the rest of the day grumbling about delays due to a casualty on the tracks. In the Internet realm, William walks the corridor for a final time as the lights turn out, before saying one word – “Now” – and being plunged into darkness. I’m sure they thought this was a very artsy, contemplative ending, but frankly it’s just another confusing choice at the tip of a mountain of confusing choices. Is it meant to make the viewer realise that this is happening right now, in the real world (whether this is true or not is another question)? Much to think about (or not, you’ll probably forget you saw this 10 minutes after the credits have rolled).
I mean, isn’t this the most romantic thing you’ve ever seen? New main ship omg #WIM4EVA
I’ve seen quite a lot of 00s-10s internet thrillers at this point, with varying degrees of shitness. To name a few: One Point 0, My Little Eye, Pulse (the terrible American remake), and the absolute masterpiece DeVour, a film where Jensen Ackles’ girlfriend turns out to be his mother… and also the Devil. I do have to wonder if this is a masochistic obsession at this point. Are there any good internet thrillers? Frankly, the 90s brought much better offerings: Hackers is a camp masterpiece, and Sandra Bullock’s The Net has aged badly enough to be terribly entertaining. But there is an air about these 00s/10s films where they clearly thought they were being so clever by commenting on the dangers of the internet, whilst also blatantly being written by adults who did not understand it at all. So the search continues. What else am I going to spend precious hours of my life doing if not watching diabolically bad films no-one else has seen?
So, back to Nakata. Admittedly I have not delved into the rest of his filmography, but I don’t think it’s outrageous to suggest he probably peaked with Ring. Again though, why the hell did he direct this? It’s one of his few English-language films, and despite obviously having a background in thrillers, the vibe is completely different to his horror-focused projects. And based on the low Letterboxd watches and sub-$1 million box office, it’s not hard to see why he went back to making films in Japan after. Honestly everyone in this is also lucky that it happened early enough in their careers to be forgotten; Taylor-Johnson, Poots and Kaluuya in particular have all more than proven themselves since, thank God. I hope they look back on this and laugh. “Hey guys, remember when we did that shit chatroom thriller? Yeah, that was a joke, wasn’t it?” Because if they can’t laugh, I suspect they would probably cry. And pray this film never sees the light of day again. Sorry, guys.
Director: Hideo Nakata
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Imogen Poots, Matthew Beard, Daniel Kaluuya, Hannah Murray
Runtime: 97m
Certificate: 15
Country: UK
Year: 2010
Images: Molinaire, Notting Hill Films, Revolver Entertainment, The Weinstein Company
me when I’m sitting in the toilets at London zoo and my internet boyfriend messages me ‘uwu kys *nuzzles you*’