by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mitchell Holland, Jess Ciancio, Pauline Grace
Intro:
… nightmare fuel wrapped in stylish packaging.
On 21 July 2019, as part of the annual Melbourne WebFest, ABC hosted a live pitching competition where budding creators could put forward ideas for a new web series, with the winner receiving a grant to put towards the project. That year, the prize went to Mitchell Holland, who pitched a “paranoid thriller” about the dangers of social media and the viral phenomenon of unboxing videos. The project itself would go through some structural changes over the next six years, shifting from a planned set of 6x 20-minute episodes to its own bespoke feature, but at last, it is here. And bloody hell, is it freaky!
Holland not only handles the writing, direction, editing, and visual effects, but he’s also the central star. In this case, the streamer @BoxSlave, who videos himself opening packages that he buys off the Dark Web for his initially-miniscule viewer base.
Holland captures the nervous and rather pitiable energy of a ground-level online streamer, doing his best to entertain and maintain his audience while visibly struggling to find his own voice and identity outside of parroting movie quotes (not that we judge…). As the main physical presence, he holds the fort as well as any legit webcam streamer.
And then things get weird. The editing becomes more fractured, his stream and even his own perceptions start glitching out, and what starts as innocuous parcels turn genuinely unnerving.
Both the camera work by DP Andy Burkitt and the audio post-production from Noisy Post bring the audience right into @BoxSlave’s headspace as he delves into these packages, with all manner of nail-biting tension in the unveiling of the contents, and squirm-worthy foley for the contents themselves.
The presentation for his in-universe stream is quite good too. Not directly mocking up a brand-name site like Twitch gives Holland freedom in how to arrange the interface (as opposed to attempting a 1:1 facsimile, which can have its challenges), and the chat log is both uncanny and genuinely funny. The banter, the restlessness, even a proper banger of an Easter egg video link (without a doubt, the best use of Wings in a motion picture), should all be eerily familiar for those who frequent these online spaces. With its dissociative and trippy visuals and plot, that kind of grounding helps make the horror feel that much closer to reality, along with applying a much darker thrill to the anticipation that real-world unboxing videos directly tap into.
While the plot itself unravels somewhat as it creeps into the finale (going from “what’s going to happen next?” to “okay, what is even going on?!”), there’s some solid throughlines about how much the context carwash of the Internet can warp a person’s perceptions. How the pressure to create content can lead people to desperate measures, just to appease the all-seeing eye of the ringlight-haloed camera. And how notions of just how much exists online that most of us will never see (everyday Internet access accounts for about 4% of what’s available online, while the Dark Web is around 6%), but that could be centred squarely on ourselves at any moment, can make any kind of online existence terrifying. Choosing to willingly engage with that must be a serious test of one’s will and sanity, and it’s one that pushes @BoxSlave to breaking point.
Unboxing is nightmare fuel wrapped in stylish packaging. For a mostly-one-man show, it shows major talent both in front of and behind the camera, digging deep into the guts of social media-soaked paranoia, and the demonic tug-of-war between the dangers of the Internet and the perverse thrill of actively seeking out these dangers. At 70 minutes, it wastes zero time tearing right into the nerve endings like a grisly red room show, and its blend of screenlife and more traditional iso-horror filmmaking makes for a commendable melding of both worlds.
Anyone else getting ready to change all of their online passwords, or is that just us?
