Hacked

My feelings towards the found-footage / mockumentary sub-genre could be summarised as “fatigue”. But you can still find excellent exceptions among filmmakers who are able to take on this exhausted format in a relatively creative way, and rookie director Zachary Donohue is one of those exceptions with The Den. Thematically, it deals with the dangers of the internet (in a similar way as, for instance, Megan is Missing). I don’t know if it is really technically possible for an internet attacker to do everything he does to the protagonist, I lack the technical expertise. Nevertheless, what he does to her is nothing nice and the creators successfully manage capture the despair caused by those anonymous attacks. They also stick to the concept of capturing the events through a web camera for at least half of the movie, and it’s amazing how smoothly they are able to tell a comprehensible story with such limitations. Hats off to that. By the end, the notebook’s web camera is replaced by something else… and the ending overall goes to a place that I wasn’t really expecting at the beginning. Thumbs up to that. 7/10, rounding up because it was nice. (12/04/2014)