An odd but lively mixture of slasher tropes and slacker
comedy, about a loner who may have spied on a female serial killer
The chasm between digital life and meatspace may be the only truly new subject cinema has had over the last 20 years. Of all the current angles on it, Ramin Niami’s bric-a-brac assemblage of webcam thriller, sitcom and slasher film is certainly one of the more original – even if it doesn’t finally hold together.
Dakota Shapiro plays Henry, an improbably handsome voyeur and shut-in who has barricaded himself into a room in the
Los Angeles apartment he has inherited, and spends his time watching
Women on a set of webcams he has hacked. There’s musician Sky, webcam girl Tess, new
immigrant Linnea … and Henry talks at them all as if they’re old
Friends, when he’s not nervously wolfing downers in response to anything that upsets him. Then, in one scrying session, he sees Laura (Vlada Verevko), a piercing-eyed beauty with a scary boyfriend turnover, drag what seems to be a bodybag across her floor.