Catfish: A review
Tech-phobes left cold by The Social Network will find vindication in Catfish, a slow-burning documentary about the online friendship between a documentary filmmaker, Nev, and a young artist named Ali. Nev begins as flippant, smugly requesting art from the precocious nine-year-old who contacts him out of the blue as well as forging curiously close online ties with her family. If shooting a documentary about the young artist through the perspective of her much-older male friend seems curious, things later take a far stranger turn. Catfish’s dull production disappoints, and the moral of the film is one already known to anyone raised on Net Nanny and Comic Chat. However, what emerges is a genuinely perturbing study of just how much we give of ourselves to the online ether, a limbo plane on which truth lacks a concrete definition. Catfish terrifies by spinning a narrative from these personal details, available for free to anyone on any of us. It is open-access horror, the definitive anti-Facebook movie.
