One of the TV highlights of the year so far was Cyberbully, the one-off, real-time Channel 4 drama starring Maisie Williams as a teenager who gets hacked while on her computer, and a nightmare ensues in her bedroom. It was brilliant.
So I was expecting a lot from this similarly-themed film and I wasn't disappointed. Set almost entirely on the screen of a laptop belonging to teen Blaire Lily, it tells the real-time story of six school friends caught in a virtual vortex by an unknown hacker, who seems to know an awful lot about them.
It starts off with a YouTube clip, a shaming video that led a vicious bully to kill herself. A year later, six of her acquaintances are online together in their respective bedrooms when an anonymous intruder eavesdrops on their conversation.
At first the uninvited visitor seems to be just an irritant. But as the group realise that they can't avoid this invader, who claims to be the suicide victim returned, a deadly game begins where the hacker gradually terrifies each one of them.
It's as daft as any horror film made post-Scary Movie, and no one involved seems to realise that all they have to do is close their laptop and walk away, but that's beside the point. This film may be far-fetched, but it is also clever, manipulative and great fun.
Okay, you can hazard a guess at what's going to happen, but it's so well executed (sorry!) that the entertainment factor far outweighs the inevitability of it all.
Technophobes might tut-tut about the evils of the internet, but the truth is that the only evil lurking on the internet is us humans.
John Byrne
