This isn’t my favourite teen-crime noir thriller about social media justice with regards to the question of who’s the real villain in social media punishment…but it’ll do. Is it the person who [perhaps naively] tweets something inappropriate and/or offensive, or the mass who jump on the tweeter like a pack of wolves to name, shame and maim them? Sharing their most personal & private information for the world to see and putting them at genuine risk. That’s what the latest NYAFF film I reviewed tries to explore.
After that mouthful of an opener, let’s get serious about the South Korean mystery centred around a group of teens who generally use the internet a whole bunch, Socialphobia. Ji-Woong (Byun Yo-Han) and Yong-Min (Lee Joo-Seung) are two friends studying to be cops when they get involved in a form of social/internet justice after a girl, Min (Ha Yun-Kyoung) – who goes by the username Rena – tweets out something offensive about the recent suicide of a soldier. The internet hits back in a frenzy and Ji-Woong and Yong-Min join a group of online vigilantes to go and confront Min after her address is made public. Things go south fast when they turn up at her apartment to discover her body, and with the group streaming the [attempted] confrontation live via the internet the police get quickly involved. Suicide is determined to be the ruling of Min’s death, and with the group of internet lovers now brutalised themselves for their part in the events, their social lives as they know it are over. But the group isn’t so sure Min’s death was suicide and they decide to track down the person they feel might be responsible for the now suspected murder and help clear their own names that have been tarnished.
Director Hong Seok-Jae is taking a clear look under the microscope about online witch hunts and, in general, how we as a society haves allowed social media to dictate our lives. It’s certainly not the first film in recently years to do so and it surely won’t be the last but the manner in which the online community is portrayed is really quite close to home. That’s not to say everyone online is a bunch of angry teenagers looking to destroy the good name of someone once something like this breaks out, but more so in the way in which people are so quick and eager to abuse a stranger via a computer without ever really knowing the person to begin with, and the power in which it all holds. Chances are so many people who do it in the real world aren’t even aware of the impact they’re having, thinking nothing of it and therein lies the problem and what director Seok-Jae wants to pinpoint.
It’s a statement of intent by Seok-Jae to have us look at ourselves as a society but while Socialphobia might start well with great intentions, it’s all a bit too much to keep up with, with an over-saturated story and main characters that are either unlikeable, outright annoying or hardly ever seen or explored. Add to that the idea that all of these infamous internet moderators are seemingly capable of murder (which, even for a film like this, is a bit far-fetched) and you have a film that has a nice idea with a strong moral backbone that quickly turns into another over-blown film about how the internet is a bad bad thing, where in reality this is just the evolution of society that we’ve allowed to happen.
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