Critics reviews

Scarier, funnier, and more narratively clever than its already impressive predecessor.

Dark Web, not overly compromised by success, retains its predecessor’s sense of lo-fi menace, marrying the now-established “rules” of the budding franchise to a fresh storyline.

It is a desperate examination for a desperate time that horror in all its contemporary forms has all but ignored, preferring instead to relocate problems to the realm of the individual or retreat into the past, as if to tell us that it is okay to be “just a movie.” Dark Web is just a movie too, but you wouldn’t know just by watching it.

With screens within screens and a wide range of characters, the hectic drama conjures a frenzied paranoid fantasy of online marauders and their vast powers. But it adds up to little, despite a fine Hitchcockian twist of a single transgression leading inevitably to doom.

Aside from the skilfully-realized, Haneke-esque creepiness of the cached (or should I say Caché’d?) videos Matias finds on his new acquisition’s hard drive, the terror here is largely conceptual, more in line with the paranoid, every-breath-you-take thrillers of the early 1970s than the grim, creeping catharsis of J-horror.

Susco, making his filmmaking debut here (after writing thrillers like The Grudge and The Grudge 2), knows better than to mess with a good formula. Instead, he finds ways to amp up the terror—namely, by abandoning the first movie’s supernatural spin and reminding us of the horrors lurking in the real world, on the real Internet.

What’s striking in this movie, apart from an ostentatiously glitchy screen distortion that occurs whenever a denizen of the “dark web” appears on one of the screens within screens, is how credibly its extreme trolling plays.