Chatroom

Horrible teens somehow get sucked in to doing horrible things by a floppy haired sulky cliché of the spoilt upper crust.

Past the original idea of portraying internet chat rooms as a physical space this movie has nothing new to offer. Every character is so one dimensional it's a joke. You have sulky emo kid angry at the world. The conservative political girl, the shy geek and the posh totty who hates being posh. This plays out more like a poorly written teen novel than a movie. I thought the manipulation of the other teens by the angry Emo was far too simple. Within one conversation he has the conservative character smearing feces all over her parents car.

I found it hard to relate to any of the characters because they had no depth. None of them felt real to me. I just hated them all. The only reason I kept watching was in the hope I'd see them all get their comeuppance.

The film is very nice to look at with some quite clever visual ideas for some of the chat rooms. Also the stop motion sections were quite a nice break from the whiny teens.

In the end all this movie really ended up being was a very heavy handed message of 'be careful who you talk to on the internet'. I just wanted to be entertained and not spoken to like a child.

It's a rather odd movie, this Chatroom. Most of the story (not all) takes part in cyberspace, which is visualized in an interesting way. The chatroom is not shown through a computer screen with typed text, but as a real room where our characters meet. This gives this movie quite a strange feel, theatrical at points, but it is quite effective.

Will is the guy behind the chatroom. It all starts out fairly innocent but slowly we get drawn into his real intentions. The people who come in his chatroom all have their own issues. They are lonely in real life, traumatized or misunderstood, and in the chatroom they find people who they can tell their stories to. At first this seems to have a healing effect, but slowly we see that all is not what it seems to be.

What this movie shows, IMO, is the loneliness many people face, and also the dangers of using internet for our main communication. Like Will's mum tells him at one point; 'You can not help yourself if you are only talking to strangers. You need to communicate with us.' The plot is not too difficult to figure out and quite predictable, but it's worked out reasonably well and for me, the movie just got under my skin. There is no winner in this movie. I would not name this to be a thriller, but more a psychological drama. The feeling I am most left with is sadness.

Though this movie doesn't come close to the strength Hideo Nakata's 'Ringu' or 'Dark Water' have, and has a whole different feel to it, I do consider it worth watching.

Saw this at a London hotel preview screening today.

Top marks for effort in trying to translate internet chat rooms onto the screen. It did take me quite a while to adjust to the visual interpretations of online cyberworld chatting but having said that, it was very cleverly done if a bit stagy. This is not a horror film. Despite the surrealistic online interpretation, this was first and foremost a dark teenage drama that quite effectively highlights the dangerous mental traps that socially withdrawn youngsters can face online in real life. Maybe parents of teenagers who spends all their time on the internet, may well find this to be a horror film and start taking away their kids computers, then push a football into their hands.

Of course this being cinema, liberties need to be taken with plausibility to turn this intriguing drama into a dark thriller. But it works. Its just that it took a heck of a long time to really get going with the main plot. The dialogue also felt very sluggish. The young actors however, were very good and did well to emote their feelings convincingly.

I was very bewildered at the inclusion of a couple of stop motion animated cartoons which I get the impression were supposed to be darkly funny but I did not find it in the least bit amusing. Maybe that was the idea but it served no purpose in the flow of the movie for me. Also, this being a British Film Four production, it feels so, and you wont find any money spent on special effects apart from a change of wallpaper in the chat rooms.

Overall though, this is a very good thought provoking film with decent performances from the young cast. It is an effective thriller but very sluggish until it really picks up momentum in the 3rd act.

Chatroom is a disturbing film about a young man named Will (Aaron Johnson from Kickass) who sets up a chat room called "Chelsea Teens!". Four other teenagers join this site and soon they begin exchanging information as though they where life long friends. The chat room is brilliantly shown in physical form and the "friends" effortlessly jump from real life to the chat room which is portrayed as a sleazy run down hotel where all chatrooms are represented by different rooms.

The film is stylishly shot and hats off to director Hideo Nakata for doing something bold and different. The film is most certainly not one to let the younger teens sneak into as they may be drawn by the young skilled cast; the film is a visceral work and will play with your mind. The main topic here is isolation, all these kids have problems and the forlorn Will manipulates them via the chat room. He gets into their heads and influences their lives with devastating effects.

All in all this is a good film, very well shot and well acted Imogen Poots who plays Eva in the film is simply divine and a name we will hear a lot more about.Go into this film knowing as little as possible about it and have an open mind it will pull at the strings in your head and it unearths a dark world that is out there.

Before I set to record this film, that was shown on Film 4 last night, I presumed it'd be a trite U.S. comedy/horror, full of gross-out and stoned slackers.

How pleasantly surprised I was to find it to be a deep, unpredictable British psychological thriller that's high on design and imagination. Yes, the actors look like they've escaped off sets of U.K teen dramas such as Skins, but they are playing characters that that market already caters for.

It's quite neat how the protagonist, Aaron Johnson, (Will) is accessing the chat-room in question via his PC or smartphone but is also then seen within it. As we soon get to know, Will's psychological make-up and difficulties are complex and largely unexplained. Is the chat-room itself purely in his mind and is the labyrinth of other rooms that we see at the start also only in his imagination? If so, that's quite a neat way of adding extra texture and substance that's already there.

The challenging soundscapes and things like the animations add extra meat to the body of expression that director Hideo Nakata uses - and I personally liked them and thought they added to the film. Some of the discussions on serious emotional conditions and suicide may help those who are exposed to those feelings and experiences, or they may not - depending on how mentally well one is. But at least it raises them, which is quite brave.

I don't necessarily think that the "hammy" acting that many have criticised is out of place here - touching and nuanced performances would be out of place in this aggressively symbolic and stylised movie. And, when one types on Facebook, with modern, abbreviated cyber-speak and even more so with Twitter, then dialogue is even more stilted, with even less room for delicate expression.

The other characters add to the mixture of messed-up heads and some social comment on what is acceptable and what isn't gets some interesting airing. I think many viewers who've come back from the pub and expected a simple cat and mouse cyber-bullying flick may have well been unprepared for how deep and complex this thriller is and been put off by that. It's a brave and imaginative film; flawed, yes. A nice bonus for those of us who've visited the locations such as Camden Lock and London Zoo are indeed, the familiar locations.