Catfish functioned off of the same marketing brilliance that The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity utilized, promising audiences a massive payoff of spectacle at the end of an (allegedly) true documentary. While Blair Witch and Paranormal both are admittedly fictional, however, Catfish rode the majority of its press junkets insisting that all the materials held within were, in fact, 100% factual. And regardless of the content, any event that promises, overtly, that all of its contents are COMPLETELY true is obviously broadcasting the notion that what you are about to view is simply TOO incredible to be true. In the case of Catfish, however, nothing could, in fact, be further from the truth.
I’m about to spoil the entire movie, so if you’re at all still interested in the ‘twist’ ending to this ‘documentary’ stop and proceed no further. Basically, a documentarian falls in love with a girl over Facebook who turns out to be an illusion skillfully crafted by an older woman who has no real escape or life of her own. She lived vicariously through an internet persona and it hurt this man who expected her to be a real-life, true-to-form girl when he showed up unannounced on her doorstep (all these ridiculous, contrived, overdramatic events ACTUALLY take place in the movie). It sounds like the worst concept for a second rate reality TV show ever, right? Take contestants each week and follow their journeys as they physically meet the people whom they have engaged with for so long digitally. The point of that comparison, however, is to show how trivial and short-lived the experience would be. You could probably cram three of these romances into a single half-hour show, and have an ample, clean program. But rather than encasing three romances into half an hour, Catfish drags one romance out for almost ninety minutes. And the audience feels every…single…one.
It isn’t until roughly forty minutes into the movie that anything substantial AT ALL occurs in the narrative. The threesome of artists filming the documentary show up at the alleged love interest’s home address to find no one home. What adds to the general creepy tone of the whole shebang, is that they pull this maneuver at roughly 3 A.M. After striking out at her home address, the boys show up at the address of her family, and, with roughly forty minutes left in the film, unravel the thrilling conclusion (not exactly at break-neck pace).
For the sake of the film itself, I violently hope and pray that the story was completely factual and that this wasn’t a half-assed attempt at actual narrative. The story is one of the slowest, worst paced, most drawn out bores I’ve encountered in the longest time, and even from a non-fictional point-of-view, really does little to affect the audience in any fashion. The entirety of the piece feels forced, self-indulgent and entirely too self-referential to be enjoyed by ANYONE outside of the production team. What could have easily been conveyed in twenty minutes goes on for four times as long. The entire project is sloppy and rests on the single scare tactic of, “This really occurred!” Catfish is a documentary that should surely be avoided when so many other excellent docs have recently made their way to see the light of day.
Performance/Direction: 29/100
Script: 40/100
Cinematography/Aesthetics: 42/100
Score: 28/100
Overall: 30/100
xoxohearts,
Alex
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