Filtered Movie Review - Phantom Face

Vincenzo Nappi's Filtered finds horror in amusing filters.

With First Bite and now Filtered, director Vincenzo Nappi provides irrefutable evidence of his skill of creating effective horror using minimalistic decorations. If First Bite was entirely filmed in a bathroom, then Filtered, which recently premiered at the Cabane à Sang Film Festival, takes place within the confines of a single room and is shown to us through the screens of the computer - think Unfriended and Searching and you will know what style I am talking about.

Jasmine (Jasmine Winter) has had a bad day at work. Look at her desktop, and you will find three versions of the Letter of Resignation. She will soon leave her current job, which is made more evident by her sad expressions and low-spirited tone as she summarizes her day on the job. Jasmine is video calling with Marco (Marco Carreiro), who is definitely not doing his homework. Their chitter-chatter leads them to play with the filters. Marco shows off his weirdness with ghost-face, spacesuit, etc. filters. Jasmine laughs at his "cringe," forgetting all about her unpleasant day. Now that's what friends are for - to cheer you up and divert you from your somber mood. But this happiness is temporary. Worse things await for poor Jasmine.

When you first lay eyes on Jasmine, she is seen sitting on the left side of her screen. The room is dark, and your eyeballs keep darting to the door on her right. It vibes of monstrosity as if evil is lurking in the caliginosity of the shadows. And then, Jasmine selects the dog filter. It's an innocuous choice, but the results are menacing. The filter works all right though it appears not on Jasmine's face but on the right side - in front of that empty, black door!

Nappi constructs horror out of an idea that might have come across almost everyone at least once while going through Snapchat filters, alone in your room. It's truly frightening to think about and can scare the daylight out of you, even in the presence of blazing sunlight. Nappi chose night-time to amplify the fear element. His methods work, thanks largely to the closeness we feel to his material. It's not impossible to imagine yourself in the scenario as, if not by supernatural forces, this type of incident can happen due to a bug in the application. The face detector in your app can malfunction after a new update. But what happens with Jasmine is no buggy matter. I wonder if this is her new apartment. Ghosts don't strike suddenly without revealing their presence through small interactions (lights behave abnormally, doors shut or open without human intervention, and so on and so forth). Jasmine may have moved in recently and so must have not noticed any bizarre occurrences. Pity her first time had to be like this. Of course, these are my speculations. Jasmine might have always lived in the same apartment, and the ghost might have decided to strike on this particular night out of boredom or whatever (I don't know. I have never lived as a ghost).

Before the real horror show, I shuddered after looking at an icon on Jasmine's desktop. Why, it was Avast Antivirus! My computer and I have bad memories of that software, and I wanted to shout at Jasmine, "Uninstall the antivirus!" Well, it's too late now, I guess.

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