Chatroom (2010)

A group of jaded teenagers meet online in an internet chatroom called Chelsea Teens! The group led by William a clever and manipulative adolescent, form a quick and tight bond via sharing their most intimate secrets with each other. However as they bond tighter together it is apparent some members of the chatroom have more sinister agendas.

Director Hideo Nakata is best well known for Ringu, a chilling tale of a mysterious video which kills anyone who watches it, was in many ways the catalyst for Hollywood remaking Japanese horror. Ringu was remade as The Ring, with Naomi Watts, quickly followed by Ju-on, remade as The Grudge starring Buffy. In both cases the Hollywood remake is not a patch on the original. And this is what Chatroom feels like, a cheap and rushed Hollywood remake. However this time there is no precursor.

Let's start with the good stuff though. At the heart of Chatroom there is an interesting and potentially compelling premise. The internet is the one place which offers true anonymity and Nakata portrays this via an innovative physical visualisation of the online world, focusing on the chatroom arena. You watch the characters make their way down long corridors filled with stereotypical internet users deep in conversation with each other. You see couples getting busy who clearly don't match the physical description they are giving each other, alongside the more sinister picture of grown adults talking with young children.

Along the corridors there are a number of different doors, each the gateway into a different chatroom. Once inside Nakata films the interactions as physical encounters, with each character sat on a chair facing the others, in something akin to a group counseling session. The occasional flashbacks to the users sat at their computers keeps us grounded in the real world and works well in demonstrating how some characters, but not all, portray themselves in a very different light online.

However this interesting premise is let down by a poorly constructed script and distinct lack of character development. The dialogue between the group at their first encounter feels incredibly forced and the ease with which William (Aaron Johnson - post Kick Ass) leads the group into sharing their most intimate secrets is far too rushed. The secrets which each member chooses to share are clichéd at best and ill thought through and borderline offensive at worst.

In a film with effectively only 5 characters there should be enough scope within the script to bring each character to a satisfying conclusion. Unfortunately this is not the case here, with the film quickly focusing on the relationship between William and Jim (Matthew Beard) so leaving the other three characters floating in the wind. There is simply no effort made to resolve their sub plots and all three feel significantly short changed.

I was left sorely disappointed by Chatroom. Through its clichéd characters and lack plot development you are left with what feels like a hollow shell of a film. You have to give it credit for attempting to deal with the dangers associated with the internet such as sexual predators and teen suicide, but it does so in such a clumsy and misjudged manner that whatever message it is trying to portray is simply lost.

With a director with the pedigree of Nakata and a premise of real potential this should have been better. In fact it needs remake.

Fmovies: Five troubled teenagers connect to the chatrooom "Chelsea Teens!" in Internet to meet each other and talk in a self-help group. When the depressive Jim decides to commit suicide, the destructive sociopath William lures and pushes him to the edge to force him to kill himself.

The storyline of "Chatroom" is intriguing since the author uses a physical room to depict the conversations of the teens as if they were happening in the real world.

Unfortunately this promising and interesting concept is the only good thing in this boring and shallow film. The execution with several subplots keep going back and forth from Internet to the real world but they are unattractive and maybe indicated for teens. In the end, I was no longer paying attention to this annoying flick. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Chat – A Sala Negra" ("Chat – The Black Room")

Chatroom's moderately interesting premise and style is disabled incoherently from the get-go by wet performances, a desperate attempt to appeal to angsty teenagers and a genuinely appalling approach to certain social issues. Chatroom tries its best to glamorise cyber-bullying and manipulation. Aaron Taylor-Johnson's sociopathic geek is an over-troped Hollywood act that has really run its course and Johnson brings little talent to the role. What's even more disappointing is that this is part of the filmography of Hideo Nakata, the obviously hit-and-miss Creator of decent horror films like 2002's Dark Water and 1998's Ring.

Chatroom fmovies. I'm a bit suspicious of the number of decent reviews of this on here, glossing over the major shortcomings of this film.

Although the depiction of the chat-room as physical space is mildly clever (and it definitely feels as if the whole story was built to use this gimmick), the reactions of the characters to their space is completely unconvincing. The obvious lack of conviction and personality coming from any of the cast is almost forgivable given the atrocious script and pointless motivations.

One of Chatroom's strangest failures is that it doesn't seem able to integrate and weave together main-plots with sub-plots and character development, instead assigning blocks of time and space to deal with each separately. It makes unsatisfying story-telling; not all that much interaction takes place between the main characters, their lives mostly just play out independently, without much consequence except to show how inexplicably malicious the main character is. As sub-plots, we are treated to a cringeworthily over-acted memory of the main character's past, and at least two COMPLETELY unresolved sub-plots of other characters, one's disagreement with her parents, and another's obscure and pointless love for his friend's much younger sister. How can they open that can of worms and forget about it?! It's just bad story telling.

Also, maybe a minor point compared to the rest, but it's a bugbear of mine. The presentation of the chat-room and the use of the internet is unsophisticated in its depiction; both simplistic and unrealistic. If it was meant to be a close-to-the-bone comment of the dangers of the internet, why of all things use the outmoded chat-room? It doesn't work.

Horrible teens somehow get sucked in to doing horrible things by a floppy haired sulky cliché of the spoilt upper crust.

Past the original idea of portraying internet chat rooms as a physical space this movie has nothing new to offer. Every character is so one dimensional it's a joke. You have sulky emo kid angry at the world. The conservative political girl, the shy geek and the posh totty who hates being posh. This plays out more like a poorly written teen novel than a movie. I thought the manipulation of the other teens by the angry Emo was far too simple. Within one conversation he has the conservative character smearing feces all over her parents car.

I found it hard to relate to any of the characters because they had no depth. None of them felt real to me. I just hated them all. The only reason I kept watching was in the hope I'd see them all get their comeuppance.

The film is very nice to look at with some quite clever visual ideas for some of the chat rooms. Also the stop motion sections were quite a nice break from the whiny teens.

In the end all this movie really ended up being was a very heavy handed message of 'be careful who you talk to on the internet'. I just wanted to be entertained and not spoken to like a child.

Chatroom is a disturbing film about a young man named Will (Aaron Johnson from Kickass) who sets up a chat room called "Chelsea Teens!". Four other teenagers join this site and soon they begin exchanging information as though they where life long friends. The chat room is brilliantly shown in physical form and the "friends" effortlessly jump from real life to the chat room which is portrayed as a sleazy run down hotel where all chatrooms are represented by different rooms.

The film is stylishly shot and hats off to director Hideo Nakata for doing something bold and different. The film is most certainly not one to let the younger teens sneak into as they may be drawn by the young skilled cast; the film is a visceral work and will play with your mind. The main topic here is isolation, all these kids have problems and the forlorn Will manipulates them via the chat room. He gets into their heads and influences their lives with devastating effects.

All in all this is a good film, very well shot and well acted Imogen Poots who plays Eva in the film is simply divine and a name we will hear a lot more about.Go into this film knowing as little as possible about it and have an open mind it will pull at the strings in your head and it unearths a dark world that is out there.