Don’t Log Off Review

Don’t Log Off is now available to buy or rent on digital.

Most of Don’t Log Off is seen through webcams and smartphone cameras, but it doesn’t start out that way. The first scene is a more traditional slice of horror filmmaking, following a young woman as she drives home at night. She gets out of her vehicle and then gets abducted, dropping her phone in the empty street. The camera slowly pushes in on the screen as though it’s in a tractor beam, and from there, we’re all digital. Unfortunately, this shift to the “screenlife” mode of Unfriended and Searching isn’t as dramatic as it could be, because Don’t Log Off often fudges and fails to justify its desktop POV.

Set at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Don’t Log Off picks up as a group of college friends gather on a video call to throw a social-distanced surprise party. They’re all having a grand old time, right up until the birthday girl, Sam (Brielle Barbusca), steps away to check on a delivery but never returns, leaving her webcam still running. COVID quarantine made us all do some wacky stuff, but even by those standards, her sudden disappearance is strange – no one’s even had the chance to sing “happy birthday” yet and the guest of honor’s stepping away?

The ensuing mystery-thriller vibe eschews the supernatural threats haunting some of Don’t Log Off’s screenlife predecessors, but it also sacrifices some of their versatility. The notion of a ghost in your machines is frightening because it could reach you anywhere with wireless reception, a luxury this movie doesn’t have. Unfriended might be a better movie, but it’s not like its characters are much stronger than the ones in Don’t Log Off – among them: the snarky one (Ariel Winter), the tech-savvy one (Khylin Rhambo), the one who does all the fake-out jump scares and makes a crack about the “Blair Bitch” Project (Luke Benward). The problem is that a single, earthly assailant hardly expresses our fears that we’re in danger even at home behind a computer screen. These goobers are all safe in their respective quarantines. To get them to wander, one by one, into harm’s way, Don’t Log Off has precisely one idea: go check on Sam at her place.

It works once. If I were feeling generous, I might even say it works twice, after someone goes to check on the person who went to check on Sam. By the third and fourth time, though, it becomes a farce, all the while maintaining a brave, “I bet it’s all a prank” face alarmingly far into the sort of movie where it is never a prank. I half-expected the characters to walk into Sam’s apartment and start tripping over a pile of bodies, because surely the villain had run out of places to hide them all.

Granted, the repetition doesn’t totally sap the tension. Call it the great boon of screenlife and its big brother, found footage: Peering into a fictional world exclusively through a cramped camera angle is inherently unnerving, and no amount of crummy writing or questionable acting can totally squash it. And Don’t Log Off has plenty of crummy writing and questionable acting: The cast are never once believable as close friends, and their stilted banter is much closer to that of jousting coworkers. But they’re at least believably in peril when they’re FaceTiming their way through a dark room.

Yet even here, the film’s execution does the format no favors. Beyond the IRL opening scene, Don’t Log Off aches for you to know it has been directed and edited: We’re constantly seeing zoomed-in views of relevant text or full-screen reaction shots from the characters’ camera feeds. Such flourishes feel pointless and awkward given how straightforward the few scenes of internet sleuthing are. Not only do they puncture the immersion, but they induce a headache. Headaches are a symptom of COVID-19, though, so at least Don’t Log Off was able to successfully transmit one “you are there” scare from its screen to ours.