Movie Review: Catfish (2010)

Catfish (2010): I'm no big fan of horror films, as will soon become apparent. My fear of things that go bump in the night is well known, particularly among the group of four friends who went with me to the pirates section of Madame Tussauds in Amsterdam (which we visited in between getting madly stoned and whatever else it is you do in Holland, weep and yelp Denish Bergkamp! I suppose). This was no pirate exhibition, this was putting a load of perverts in tightly-packed cells, turning the lights off and getting naive (fuckin' idiot) tourists to walk between them. What's this got to do with Catfish, you may be asking. This film creeped me out much, much more than any Dutch pirate could ever aspire to do.

Catfish is a documentary film by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost focusing on photographer (and Ariel's brother) Nev Schulman's ongoing relationship with a young girl named Abby who contacts him by email and posts him watercolour paintings of his own photographs. As things develop, the friendship goes onto Facebook and we're introduced to Abby's mother and half-sister Megan in addition to various other friends. The family member we hear most from is the mother Angela, which is fairly innocent on the surface. The film, on this level, is rather tame, it's just some girl who likes painting and is being encouraged by her mum. However, things become increasingly creepy as Nev's relationship with Megan becomes deeper while more and more holes appear in the family's story. The truth of the family becomes apparent with about 40 minutes remaining as opposed to the very end of the film, and simply allowing the utter absurdity of the situation to set in is rather horrifying as we see that what we'd been told is, in fact, completely false. You sense that this isn't just the audience's emotion - at various points members of the filming trio attempt to bail, varying from quitting the project as a whole to simply going back to the car to avoid the awkwardness.

What was most amazing to me was the text at the end updating the audience on what had occurred after the film's conclusion which adds another twist, revealing that even some of the film's revelations were, in fact, not altogether true. Catfish is a film that is nothing on the surface but becomes a very interesting and slightly frightening insight into the more peculiar members of our society and the webs of lies that can be spun with the use of social networking platforms. Whether it's all real or not I'm not sure, and I'm not going to spend much time deconstructing that particular facet. It's presented as a documentary and, in this case, I'll take it at face value, even if one of the more blatant messages of the film is to do exactly the opposite of that. Two thumbs up.