Another 'good until the third act' horror flick...

For at least half of its runtime, Unfriended is a pretty damn good ghost story. It keeps you guessing, forces you to use your imagination a lot, and appears to be leading towards a chilling conclusion.

And then the third act happens.

'Third act syndrome' is a problem common to most horror films that rank above average, and all that rank below. Namely, in trying to raise the stakes for the finale it just becomes more ridiculous. The characters completely stop being interesting, the drama get replaced by shouting, and the rules of the game are spelled out. Any horror film that plays the game of excess always ends up turning into a comedy. It ends not with a chilling silence, but the cinematic equivalent of a fart joke (nothing against farting).

But how does this state of affairs come to be? The beginning two acts are, mostly, quite subtle. The characters backstory's are hinted at rather than shouted in your face, the fear comes mostly from the unknown, and the film manipulates your imaginative faculties to a pleasingly frightening degree. You feel like you're in the hands of a very able director. But then at the end... it almost felt like it became a different movie. Everything that was good about the first half of the movie just became ridiculous. I can't figure out why. How does it occur that a director who knows how to do a first half so well, then completely goes against everything they've achieved thus far by going in the complete polar opposite direction? You would think that anyone with the taste to create such a first half would know that all the devices in the last act of the film are silly, silly, silly. Surely?