This standalone sequel to UNFRIENDED (2014) feels like the would-be product if the writers of BLACK MIRROR and the Final FINAL DESTINATION series joined forces. Dark Web’s tone is mildly precautionary against technology, heavily gruesome, and accented by humor. In this perfect date night horror movie, the main character Matias and his five friends convene over Skype for a game night that goes wrong. When Matias discovers videos of kidnappings and murders, login information to a cryptocurrency account, and other data detailing the surreptitious dealings of an anonymous individual on his second hand laptop, a mystery hacker threatens Matias’s girlfriend Amaya’s life. The group works to save Amaya, unaware that their own lives are endangered.

Matias and his friends are a group of American twenty somethings with disposable incomes from mostly unspecified careers. Efforts to make the characters interesting and diverse seem forced as a Facebook profile - one friend has a handicap, another is DJ/child of immigrants; there is a lesbian couple, one of whom is minority, and one lives in the U.K.

The film’s terminology gets very techy, even for generations born with a smartphone in their hand. Definitions of gamer lingo and web-related terms, including the film’s title, are conspicuously cached in the dialogue.

The entire film is from the perspective of computer and mobile phones, something that, perhaps depending on your age, you’ll either feel at home with or find maddening. Until the plot truly starts rolling, you’re at the mercy of Matias’s mundane multitasking - clicking from app to app, to site, borderline compulsive logins and logouts, video chat screens, and SMS messages. I went from squirming in my seat out of boredom, to riding along with the suspense, to ultimately wondering if any of this could have happened if these friends had just been “old school” and met up at a bar?

Janielle Williams