THE DEN

The Den Movie Review

Grad student Elizabeth Benton (Melanie Papalia of the similar film Smiley and Extraterrestrial) is working on a project to discover how many meaningful conversations she can have on a site, The Den, that allows users to chat with random strangers. Things take a turn for the worse when she sees a video that appears to show another user being murdered, and soon, Elizabeth, her boyfriend, and her closest friends all find themselves in danger. The entire movie is shot from the point of view of looking through or at a computer screen or cell phone, so if that turns you off immediately, you may want to skip this film entirely. 

Whole lotta this going on

While distracting at first, if this doesn't make you want to turn the movie off instantly, it's pretty easy to get past--at this point, enough movies are shot similar to this that I'm just sort of used to it. The story isn't anything new, some of the events that unfold are highly questionable and require a lot of forgiveness for their ridiculousness, and the ending is pretty disappointing. Where the movie succeeds is in creating a lead character you actually cheer for--at least for most of the film. There are some brutal scenes here and there to keep your attention, but the reveal of them is rather uninteresting. More than anything, The Den comes off as more a social commentary on the darkness that exists on the internet, and possibly even touches on the human disconnect these ways of communication present--had this film focused more on the latter, it may have been more interesting, but what we get instead is just a just below average little horror flick.

On A Scale Of One To Ten: 4

The Den Movie Trailer