This review is about a found footage horror movie, so there might be some slight blood, gore, and other horror movie things mentioned! Just a heads up!

This isn't going to be super long, I’m mostly trying things out! But I wanted to talk about this movie I saw a while back. I was browsing through Hulu, and I usually don’t just click on movies right after I see them (it can take 5 to 7 business days to get my brain in order) but this one hit in just the right spot that I felt I had to watch it immediately.

This movie is called Spree. It’s a found footage horror film (and, if you stick around here, you’ll learn I can’t get enough of found footage horror) starring Joe Keery (of Stranger Things fame) as Kurt Kunkle. This was all I knew when I clicked play, and it managed to be exactly what I was looking for. So, the idea is that Kurt is a small-time Twitch (or off-brand Twitch equivalent) streamer who’s goal in life is to get people to watch him. In order to do that, he becomes a driver for an app called Spree (off-brand Uber equivalent, but this name is actually genius tbh) and live streams himself killing his passengers by poisoning the free water he’s giving them.

Here’s the spoiler-free part of my review:

The premise isn’t anything too outlandish. Many people have had the fear of being murdered by a ride share driver, as it does kind of go against the “don’t take rides from strangers” rule we were always told to follow as kids. But this movie also fits in a commentary on social media that matches more closely to my actual criticisms of social media instead of something to be hated merely because it is new. I’ll get to that more in the spoilered version. I would say, here, if you’re interested in that, and you’re interested in modern found footage horror, this is about the best I’ve found yet. There are a couple of other more modern ones I am interested in but haven’t gotten around to watching yet, and I’ll update here once I do, but so far this one takes the cake for me. Joe Keery gives a wonderful performance. Each element of the story ties together really well. Technically, it seems to be a masterpiece. And, as the icing on the cake for an ARG fan like me, there’s a real Instagram account for a couple of the characters. It’s not an actual ARG, as there’s no actual gameplay, but the multimedia detail gets me really excited. My only criticism there is that if I’d been in charge, I probably would’ve made it more of a gameplay deal. But, hats off to them, as the movie came out in 2020 and that did rather limit the things they would’ve been able to do. Honestly, props to the whole team.

Now, for the spoilered version. I highly recommend you watch this one first if you’re a found footage horror fan, but I do consistently find myself reading entire plots and spoilers for movies I don’t have time to watch, so no judgment if this is the only way you’re planning on interacting with this one!

SPOILERS!

So. Let’s talk about Kurt Kunkle. Kurt is in his early 20s, which means he would’ve been participating in social media since likely his early teenage years. That’s a formative time for a person, when they’re making their first observations about how to be a person in the quote unquote real world. Like I said, this is one of the only social media criticism movies I’ve ever actually thought was nuanced. See, this movie posits that it is not the amount of screentime making one less present or turning one’s brain to mush that is the problem. Rather, it is the very real idea that social media can warp a person’s view of the world because it gives the user the power to shape how they show their world. This is a concept that’s been talked about for a long time. When Instagram first started, it was popular to make fun of how people would show only the good times in their life, but also that if you showed off the bad times, you were attention-seeking. This is because everyone in your real life was suddenly privy to all of this information, and likewise you could see all of theirs. And for Kurt and many others like him, having no followers was the equivalent to not even existing in the new age.

This is best shown in the scene where Kurt drives right over a homeless camp, all the while exclaiming that these people have no online presence and therefore they’re basically nobody.

I know, I know. That’s intense to throw in having not talked about the buildup. I just think it hits the hardest, and drives home the point of the movie the best. See, what’s really interesting to me about this movie is that aspect of Kurt’s mindset, and how he gets to that specific point in the movie.

Kurt has likely grown up in the same narrative that I have (if that dates me, as well, haha.) If you’re on the internet, and you’re not cool in school, you have the ability to use those interests to make a name for yourself. If you can grow your following, if you can make people watch, you can make a job out of it, and make all those people who didn’t see that in you regret those thoughts even faster than ever before. And everyone can do it! If you’re not trying, you’re not living in the modern age.

This rhetoric was utterly lost on me, but it very much wasn’t to many of my peers. That’s how we got to kids eating tide pods and clickbait titles and challenge videos. People want to be seen so badly they’ll do almost anything for it. And that’s what Kurt Kunkle is thinking about when he murders his rideshare clients.

Now, obviously, I’m not endorsing what he does in this movie. I’m also not saying that social media on its own was enough to drive him to this mindset, and there’s obviously something else unchecked going on here. But I am saying that this mindset is damaging to people, even if they’re not going to hurt people for views. It makes them think that an online presence is the only chance they have at a real life, and that is part of the actual damage that social media does.

I would classify myself as “too online” sometimes, but I prefer the anonymity of sites like this and tumblr, where I don’t have to attach my real identity to my work. It’s my way of reaching out to my community, of growing a number of friends with whom I can talk about things I love without fear of people not getting it. But for people like Kurt, it’s a chance to succeed for once. It’s a chance to get those people he knows in real life to notice him, and to get strangers to think of him as someone who’s worth watching. It’s tied up in his self worth in a very real way that I think many can relate to.

The other really interesting aspect that I wanted to talk about here was the idea of spectacle. See, this whole movie is told from the perspective of a live stream. Now, it’s not all Kurt’s stream. We do jump to other characters. But the whole time, we can see the chats going. This is our perspective into what the general public, at least those online, are thinking of what is going on.

Now, Kurt has a friend named Bobby, who is younger than him (so much so he used to babysit Bobby) but is much, much more popular online. He is played by Josh Ovalle, who you might know better as the guy from the Jared, 19, never learned how to read vine. That is brilliant casting, honestly. It just adds another layer to the whole thing.

So, during his night of streaming, Kurt decides to pay Bobby a visit. When he gets hostile to Kurt, Kurt decides to kill him, too. Bobby was live streaming at the time, as well, and the whole chat for his stream starts jumping on to Kurt’s as well, skyrocketing his following. And, as a bonus kicker, everyone watching thinks its an elaborate prank, completely made up.

This is one of the most interesting things in the narrative for me. I have to imagine it to be true. I’m not sure I’d notice if someone got killed on stream like that, at least until they never turned it off. I’ve seen so many ARGs where that’s all part of the fiction. It was really interesting to see that play out.

So yeah. This movie excels at commentary, uses its found footage medium in a new way that really makes it shine, and is one of the only movies about social media I’ve ever found myself enjoying.

If you decide to watch it, I hope you enjoy it too! If you want to talk about it with me, you can hit me up on my tumblr, linked on my home page! If you wanna keep reading reviews, stick around! I’ll definitely be posting some more!

See ya later!