Catfish (2010)

****SOME SPOILERS*****

In late 2007, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost sensed a story unfolding as they began to film the life of Ariel's brother... 

The word about Catfish started building at Sundance, a stranger than fiction documentary that follows the internet relationship of Nev Schulman, a photographer in New York, and a family in Michigan. After one of Nev's photographs is published in a magazine he receives  a painting of the same picture by an 8 year old girl, Abby. Nev begins talking to Abby over the internet, and soon becomes friends with her mom Angela and sister Meagan.

Nev continues to receive paintings from Abby, who he is told has been selling paintings for up to $7000 dollars and is just about to open her our gallery. Nev's relationship with her older sister Meagan starts to become romantic as they talk though instant messaging and text messages daily. 

One night while Nev is chatting with Meagan online he asks her to record a specific cover song for him, he is surprised when she comes back 20 minutes later with a beautiful recording. Nev starts suspecting something is up when he finds the exact recording on youtube by another singer. When he goes back and starts looking up her old songs she had "recorded" for him he starts finds that they are all other singers she had just taken off the internet. That is when Nev starts looking into all the things she has been telling him to see if any of them are true....

The filmmakers said they started recording the events because they thought it would be a good short film about a prodigy 8 year old artist, that Nev had somehow stumbled across and built this internet friendship with. They never could of guessed where this film would lead them.

All of the reviews coming out of Sundance were saying that "you will not believe the last 40 minutes of this film." So I went in with very high expectations on a huge twist. To me, the movie didn't deliver that. I won't give away the ending but there was really no surprise in what happened for me. It was still a fairly entertaining movie, that really makes you think about the power of the internet and Facebook, but was not the shocking documentary that I was expecting.

When To Watch Rating: Makes You Think

Film is playing in theaters now.