Thanks to COVID-19, Timur Bekmambetov’s Screenlife films such as ‘Unfriended’ and ‘Searching’ are Hollywood’s new Holy Grail.
When Kazakh-Russian director Timur Bekmambetov was producing the 2014 horror film Unfriended, a movie told entirely on Skype screens in which a group of high school kids are haunted by a friend who’d been bullied and—they thought—committed suicide, he was constantly asked the same question: Why didn’t any of the characters, who, one by one, are freakishly tortured by the former friend, shut down their computers and go into each other’s homes?