Catfish Review

A young man, who is a photographer, named Nev Schulman lives with his brother Ariel and friend Henry Joost in New York. An an eight-year-old child prodigy artist named Abby, living in a rural part of Michigan, sends Nev a painting of one of his photos. Abby and Nev become Facebook friends in a network that is connected to lots of Abby's family members, including her mother Angela and her father as well as Abby's attractive older half-sister Megan. Megan claims to be a songwriter that takes a liking to Nev over the internet leading to a mysterious relationship.

The movie is shot as a documentary and is seriously supposed to be one, although I’m not sure if I believe it was. I didn’t know what the movie was, going into it, but I could still tell at a certain point that things weren’t as they seemed in the plot. Very early on I started to become suspicious that Megan wasn’t who she seemed. A very sexual relationship comes to Nev out of nowhere and I also felt like “Why am I watching this slightly boring story if it’s not deeper than it seems? There must be a point to this!” Eventually when she turns out to be a middle-aged woman who is married with disabled children, I was at first shocked but then another suspicion began to come over me. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “this isn’t a real documentary.” To this day I’m still not if I believed it was real or not. The first thing that I wasn’t convinced by was the family. They just seemed a bit too odd to me. It wasn’t just the way they appeared; it was also the way some of them acted, like the husband. He didn’t seem to be involved in the family at all and he was completely indifferent to the friendship that the young filmmakers began to have with the real Megan, who is really named Angela. Also, why would these people have begun chronicling this relationship so intimately in the first place? If it wasn’t real then the actors were all very good and everything done by the filmmakers was pretty convincing.

Having said that, I did enjoy the film more than I thought I would. It’s impossible to tell where it’s going when things start to unravel. It could easily have turned into a horror film where Megan is a schizophrenic serial killer. It could have also continued to be a romance. Keeping events the way they were, it could have also taken a bit of a mean-spirited comic approach. Part of me wishes it had been a horror film because I love disturbing works of art. What it did turn out to be though was a deeply humanizing and frightening tale of what people will and can do when they are miserable, lonely and a part of the internet age.

My final ruling is a 3.5 out of 5. Probably my favorite film we have seen behind The Social Network. This film actually could have also been called The Social Network. Both films do the topic justice.