Mixed Messages

Catfish is being hailed as the first film about what could happen if you're too free and easy on Facebook. It’s also supposed to be a documentary.

Nev (Yaniv Schulman) is a New York photographer who shoots stills of dancers and his brother, Rel (Ariel Schulman) and friend, Henry Joost (as Himself), are making a documentary about him.

Why they would want to make a doco about him, apart from this cute smile, beggars belief. But an 8-year-old girl contacts him and asks whether she can make paintings of his photographs. Of course she can, the easy-going if somewhat narcissistic Nev says, and thus begins a relationship that is obviously not what it seems - by the sheer inanity of it.

First of all, Nev never picks up that Abby is an incredibly literate little girl, even though she comes from the back of beyond in Michigan and about 21% of Americans are functionally illiterate. Never mind. We’re still in the realm of the possible.

Abby, of course, has a mother, Angela, and an older sister, Megan. In fact, Nev and Megan start getting the hots for each other – online. But fairly soon Nev and his two directors work out that Megan is lying to him.

Then he has to go shoot at a dance festival, which just happens to be close to where Abby and Co live on the other side of America. Again, it’s one hell of a coincidence, but funny things start happening when you make a film – or someone dies.

The way the film is constructed and scored we are led to believe that there is going to be a massive – possibly violent – conclusion or revelation, playing on our sense of other films and the ambiguity of whether it is in fact a documentary or not.

I am not supposed to give away the ending because everything hinges on it, but the best point the film makes, especially as a documentary, is that it’s good to move from ignorance to facts. In another era that knowledge would mean death, but here it means most people’s reality – and it isn’t pretty.

The build-up to the meeting with Abby’s mother, Angela (Melody C Roscher), is creepy in the extreme and continues to be for a while before the film literally segues into another genre. This is very ably done and the directors will be making Paranormal Activity 3 next for their pains.

Catfish’s title isn’t very satisfactorily explained at the end by Angela’s husband, who is creepy, pitiable and admirable, but many will feel cheated by this “documentary” which is as manipulative as its antagonist, if that's the word, and its medium. 

Neil Sonnekus