Catfish

There are many types of films that come up through the years, but none have seemed so intriguing than a documentary that was filmed in 2007, titled, Catfish. The documentary followed around Yaniv Schulman, a young photographer who has established a relationship with a young girl online using the networking site, Facebook. In the beginning of the documentary we see a friendly relationship which started with the young girl asking permission to paint a picture of one of Yaniv’s photos.
Yaniv’s digital pen pal begins to send him more and more of her panting’s and he begins to establish an online relationship with her entire family, who are also on Facebook. The story seems wholesome as Yaniv begins talking to the little girl’s older sister Megan. Yaniv and Megan start off by chatting online, and then start having night long phone, and text conversations. He begins to like Megan and often asks when they can meet.
The point in the film where you begin to fill a sense of suspicion towards the entire situation is when Megan sings a song for Yaniv, and he soon discovers that it wasn’t really Megan singing. Now at this point in the film, the directors have really put together a sort of wonderment and have us as the audience really trying to guess what really going on, with Megan and the Facebook family. There are moments that are really funny and seem to be too perfect to have been just documentary footage, but hats off to the directors and editors, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. They were able to take an apparent real life event and build a sort of suspense.
Towards the films end, I found the secret to be anti-climactic. The family that he had been speaking to and who he had established such a strong bond with, and has never met before, was all too realistic and sad. The conclusion ended up being sad and not worth minding any attention to. I rate this film two out of five stars, because it had the ambition and the build of a great Hitchcock classic, but falls flat on its face when it is finally resolved.
I did not feel like I had been ripped off in anyway because the story did have its strong points and it kept me thinking really hard as to what the actual mystery behind the Facebook family was. The film Catfish, although undeserving towards its hype, still needs to be recognized in film history, not for its somber climax but for its strong and eerie build up.