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Chatroom review
:. Director: Hideo Nakata
:. Starring: Aaron Johnson, Imogen Poots
:. Running Time: 1:37
:. Year: 2010
:. Country: UK
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Help! The Web is Evil! If you do not control your children's Internet usage, if you do not cultivate a loving mode of communication with them, if you let them find an outlet in the virtual world, watch out, poor exceeded parents, the drama is just a click away. Such is the message of Chatroom, Hideo Nakata's new film. Thinking he has found an original concept that would allow him to showcase his prowess as a director, the director of Ringu adapts to the screen a play destined for a teen audience, and embarks completely into the realm of caricature without ever ridding himself of it.
How can an Internet chat room be represented unto the screen? Nakata did not need to look very far. By literally translating the word chat room. By placing these virtual encounters into rooms (aided by surreal corridors) to the image of the alleged personality of the user having created it. To make it quite clear that it is a virtual world, it was enough for him to saturate the colors by opposing them to a representation of the real world bathed in gray light. A bit easy, and so very obvious. This device is repeated throughout the film without ever being renewed, while focusing completely on a scenario from which salvation does not derive. The film, indeed, serves us a catalog of all the neuroses of adolescence that could explain the inclination to suicide or murder.
In trying to point to the dangers of online dating, which, under the protective cover of the computer screen, exacerbate feelings and sometimes even distorts them, the film falls into clichés and ridicule. A young bimbo dreaming of becoming a supermodel, the insecure and suicidal son of a famous novelist, a depressed orphan haunted by the memory of the day his father abandoned him at the zoo, a teen with pedophile tendencies, a girl victimized by a rigid education ... These are all examples of adolescence and its turpitudes. But treated with such coarseness it just becomes laughable. The film's discourse would like to be conclusive, and claims to draw a warning, hoping to capture attention by choosing the thriller genre. But we do not believe it for one second. Without a doubt this is also due to the catastrophic directing of actors: the slightest pains, neuroses, obsessions, fears do not escape over acting, which may work at the theater, but not on the big screen. Finally, the music directing the viewer to tremble on cue becomes the film's ultimate demise. In trying to direct a brochure on the dangers of the virtual world, Nakata "bugs" and makes his system crash.
Moland Fengkov
Translated into English by Christina Azarnia
 Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
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