Chatroom (2010): The World Weird Web

Made in 2010 and directed by Hideo Nakata (the directorial genius who brought us Ringu, The Ring 2 and Dark Water just to mention a few) Chatroom is a small budgeted British thriller set in the virtual chat rooms that still fill the internet.

Aaron Johnson (having just finished working on Kick Ass) and Imogen Poots (28 Weeks Later, Fright Night 2011) head up the talented cast of youngster who populate the film.

Chatroom is primarily about William (Johnson) a teenager with a penchant for self harm and a disturbed personality. He is very smart and manipulative. He logs on the net and starts searching different chat rooms to see what is on offer. Not liking any of the rooms he visits he decides to start his own chat room, Chelsea Teens.

Chelsea Teens has no real agenda, instead it focuses on the teens who visit the room and the aspect of their lives that they hate. It’s a place for them to unload. It soon turns into a place where they reveal more information about themselves than they should.

Nakata follows the screenplay by Enda Walsh who wrote it originally as a stage play, she then adapted it for the screen. Watching the film, it looks very like a stage play. Static sets which the character can move through. Most of the action takes place in the room that represents the Chelsea Teens chat room. Very little of the film takes place out of these huge and empty rooms that represent the different rooms on the net.

That is the genius of the film and it’s setting. By creating the chat rooms as a ‘real’ setting it allows us the audience to feel what the teens are feeling when they interact in the room. All the members of the chat room sit or interact in the room as if they were really there and not typing questions, statements, and responses on a keyboard somewhere.

William sets about building up his Chelsea Teens members by entering other chat rooms and talking the odd member into entering his room. He gets Eva (Poots), Emily (Hannah Murray), Mo (Daniel Kaluuya) and Jim (Matthew Beard) to join. What these new members don’t know is that William doesn’t want to be their friend at all. He is there to create chaos and is trying to see how far his chat room ‘friends’ will follow him.

He gets one member to tell his best friend that he sexually fancies his under age sister. He tells another to flush his antidepressants down the toilet and stop taking them. All the advice and guidance he hands out is bad or at the very least not very helpful.

William has also discovered another chat room that he begins visiting on a regular basis. This room seems to be dedicated to cyber bullying and each time William returns the intensity of the bullying increases until the victim kills himself. As with every thing else referring to the chat room verse, we see the actual people bullying the helpless victim in person. We see the people and the victim and their actions and reactions, live.

Visibly impressed by the power he has witnessed in the cyber bullying room William decides that he is going to pick the weakest member of his group and get him to kill himself.

This is an amazingly powerful film. Johnson as William turns in a brilliant performance as the evil minded damaged teen who wants to punish the world. Poots is stellar as his ‘on-line’ girlfriend who decides to aid him in his nefarious plots and Beard is spot on as the lad who has to have antidepressants to get through his life.

The film won’t be for everyone. In fact the overall verdict for this film by just about everyone is bad. I think this film was panned by just about every critic there is and public reaction was poor. I honestly can’t figure out why.

The use of the ‘hotel’ rooms to represent the chat rooms and enabling the actors to interact with each other in the rooms really brings home how intimate these chat rooms can be. The set design was great. Each room was dressed as a dowdy and pretty much empty rooms that looked more like warehouse spaces than actual rooms.

When William was cruising the other chat rooms, each room had set dressing to fit the particular type of chat room it was. Eva’s chat room has her modelling pictures all over the wall and a huge frilly girls bed.

I would give this film a 2 bagger rating. I gobbled the stuff compulsively while watching this film. I didn’t want to look away from the screen for fear that I’d miss something.

Nakata and his cast have shown just how scary and dangerous the internet can be. They do this so well that you could change the www to mean the World Weird Web. So be careful who you interact with, it could be another William.