Both options are negative, but when Blaire said Mitch posted the video. Based on what we see moments later, that Blaire was the camera person, this means one of two things: 1) she was simply lying, or 2) she was attempting to get off on Exact Words because she let Mitch post the video after she shot it. The fact that Laura didn't reject it immediately as a lie hints at the second.
There are a few implications throughout the film that Blaire isn't the most computer-savvy person outside of basic social networking, including that she didn't even know what a troll was. She may have shot the video, but uploading it to a sock puppet YouTube account might have been something she would have passed off to somebody else because it was beyond her ability.
Did Blaire really not know what a troll was, or was she just acting in order to hide how familiar she was with the concept?
Did Blaire feel any remorse for what she did to Laura but was just too cowardly to own up to it, or did she feel absolutely none?
Was Laura actually trying to save Blaire? Consider how the "Don't respond to messages from dead people" post kept showing up Blaire's searches even when not relevant. Was Laura just as bound by the rules of her existence as her victims and while she gleefully slaughtered everyone else she tried, again and again, to get Blaire to confess, showing her how so that she might be spared? Blaire never did, and hence Laura was forced to kill her by the rules of her existence.
"I wish that I could forgive you, Blaire." If she was speaking literally, then holding Blaire off for last might have actually been her giving her former friend as many shots at redemption as possible before concluding that Blaire was, in fact, irredeemable.
Were Blaire's many acts (Cheating on Mitch with Adam, crashing Jess' mother's car) done out of sheer malice and sociopathy or just mistakes? While Blaire lies a lot about what she did, most of them were really to cover her own ass. Adam himself also agreed that both he and Blaire were drunk the first time. Admittedly, cheating and coming clean about it isn't something most people normally do; same with wrecking a friend's car.
Speaking of Blaire and Adam, was Blaire telling Mitch to lay off Adam during the beginning of the Never Have I Ever game because she was trying to keep everyone from turning against each other like Laura wanted, or was she just trying to stay on Adam’s good side so he wouldn’t expose their affair to Mitch?
At the end of the movie, Blaire seems genuinely shocked when she's revealed to have filmed the video that caused Laura's suicide. Is it because she's shocked that Laura managed to get ahold of the complete tape and not the edited one that Mitch uploaded, or did she genuinely forget? If she did forget, is it because she's such a sociopath that the act didn't even seem significant to her or because she was drunk?
How much of a bully was Laura Barnes in real life? Almost all of the evidence we have that supports her being a bully comes from characters who clearly have strong mean streaks themselves. Were the cruelties they inflicted on Laura grotesquely Disproportionate Retribution or somewhat justifiable/understandable individual cases of The Dog Bites Back?
What little we know of Val (she doesn't last long after we meet her) shows her to be quick-tempered, and requiring very little imagination to picture her as an Alpha Bitch herself. We only catch a snippet of the fight between her and Laura, so we don't get much context as to who started it or what the backstory was. Were we watching Laura in the act of bullying Val or was Laura standing up to Val's bullying?
Piggybacking off of the above, what are we to make of Laura's apology and plea and Val's cruel response to it? We the audience know that Laura was truly in distress and would soon end her own life, but did Val have a responsibility to know that at the time? Is it the a case of Villains Want Mercy and of a cruel bully (Laura) learning that the at-the-mercy of one's erstwhile victim (Val) is a bad place to be? Was Val gleefully leaping at a chance to be nasty to Laura after putting up with a lot of nastiness from Laura? Or was Val always the more powerful and capable of two bullies, should have known how emotionally fragile Laura really was, and should have known that her nasty response truly might have tormented Laura to suicide?
What motivated Jess to desecrate Laura's grave? And, of less importance, what exactly did she do? Was Jess a victim of Laura's bullying? Or was Jess mean spirited to Laura on general principle?
Awesome Music: The dark and brooding "Ghost in My Head" by Scissor Haus plays at the start of the end credits.
Better on DVD: A variant. The film works far better when viewed on a computer screen than on a TV or a cinema screen, especially if the computer used is a Mac.
The ending, specifically the last few seconds of the movie where Laura's ghost attacks Blaire via jump-scare. Some feel it added to the atmosphere, while others felt the inclusion of a last-minute Jump Scare ruined what could've been a subtle ending.
Leading on with that, there are some who felt that Laura shouldn't have killed Blaire, and that it would be more fitting that Blaire would left alive with the same consequences that led Laura to her own suicide.
Catharsis Factor: Every single character is a horrible human being that took part in bullying a girl to suicide without remorse and is exposed to have done horrible things to one another. It’s not surprising many viewers sided with Laura when she killed them off.
Critic-Proof: Received a mixed reception from critics and divided audiences, but made $62 million against a $1 million budget.
Dancing Bear: Many critics of the film have classified the style of Found Footage it employs as such, calling it a gimmick that is supposed to distract from a rather sub-par plot.
Diagnosed by the Audience: The news article about Laura mentions that she was a special education student, suggesting that she may have been handicapped in some way. It's also possible that the bullying had gotten so vicious that it wasn't considered safe to keep her in a normal classroom.
He's Just Hiding: A popular fan theory is Blaire survived her encounter with Laura. Both because we don't actually see her die, and having been exposed as the horrible person and finally forced to take accountability would be a far worse fate. See They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot below.
Another theory is that Laura either never came back to life and instead the teens were killed by The Circle impersonating her or her relatives enacted revenge on her behalf. A final theory features Laura having faked her death, joining The Circle and enacting her revenge on her "friends." All theories are based on a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment at the end of Unfriended: Dark Web when the main hacker is revealed to have a copy of this film.
Laura may have been an Alpha Bitch (or so claimed to be) and murdered all of the teens, some in horrific fashions, but some may feel the fact she committed suicide due to being harassed for an embarrassing video makes it hard to not feel sorry for her. Based on a few things, like a Freeze-Frame Bonus on Laura's obituary and a brief comment that Blaire types out but doesn't post to Mitch, it's discovered Laura had dealt with an eating disorder, she'd attempted suicide once before, and it's implied Laura was abused by her uncle as a child, all of which may have helped her become an Alpha Bitch (if she was).
To a lesser extent, Jess and Mitch (who were arguably the least reprehensible out of everyone), who have more apparent sympathetic qualities to them when compared to Val, Ken, Adam, and Blaire, and undergo more of a Break the Cutie experience prior to their deaths.
Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: The vengeful spirit of supposed-Alpha Bitch Laura Barns is the main villain, who puts the six main characters through horrible torment and bloody deaths. However, it's quickly made apparent that she's the most sympathetic character in the movie as most of the hatred goes to the main characters, who were the people who bullied Laura to the point of suicide. The worst ones are Adam, who roofied and raped a girl and slept with his friend's girlfriend, and the main character Blaire, who was the one who recorded the humiliating video in the first place. It's often said that the behavior of the teens was more horrifying then the supernatural deaths.
Blaire was the one who shot the video and may have been the one to put it online, not to mention she cheated on her boyfriend with his best friend twice, and ended up getting both of them killed.
If Mitch's accusations are true, and it's implied that they are (given how angry Adam gets and he puts his fingers down, that Mitch hasn't lied once in the entire movie, and that Laura includes them in the game) Adam certainly crossed this when he date raped a classmate and then forced her to get an abortion. You're really rooting for this guy to die by the time all of this is revealed. Alternatively, he crossed this by attempting to trade Jess’s life for his own.
Blaire's screaming at the end of the official trailer sounds too much like The Screaming Sheep to be taken seriously.
Both Ken's and especially Adam's suicide are pretty funny. Ken's suicide by blender goes by pretty quick and you only get snippets so it's not too bad. But Adam turning his gun toward his face while screaming "no no no!" then pulling the trigger really takes the narm cake.
Imagine something not only having access to your Skype, Facebook, and e-mail, but having access to your entire computer and your house, taking control of your computer, and then forcing you to kill yourself if you don't comply with its demands, no matter how hard you try.
And while one would think that the whole story could be avoided if just shut off their laptops, Laura prevents the teens from doing that too, saying if they do that they'll be killed.
Forget the paranormal angle, let's bring natural fears into this. You've made a mistake or three. You've fucked up hard. And now somebody's got your number and is twiddling their thumbs about punching it. Ignoring the paranormal aspects of the movie; it's a frontal display of how powerful blackmail is depending on how serious a person regrets the action. In real life; substitute (or not) revenge with money, power, hacktivism, etc. and you'd be surprised how easy it can be to get manipulated into doing anothers beck and call just because of a mistake you really regret.
Rooting for the Empire: The film seems to be actively aiming for this. Our villain is the spirit of an Alpha Bitch who was tormented by cyberbullying and committed suicide. Our "heroes" are not very good people. Blaire betrayed her former best friend and boyfriend; Jess spread a false rumor about Blaire, stole $800 from Adam, and desecrated Laura's grave; Adam slept with his best friend's girlfriend twice, is implied to have roofied a girl and forced her to get an abortion, and tried to trade his implied girlfriend Jess's life for his own; Mitch sold out his friend to the police for pot; Val cruelly rejected an apology from Laura and continued tormenting her, and Ken openly said that Laura deserved the bullying. All of them openly show no remorse for how they treated her. By the end of the movie, you're begging Laura to kill them and delighting in her taunting whenever she does.
Special Effect Failure: If you look closely during the moment where Blaire's laptop is pushed down, you can see a figure that looks nothing like Laura Barns, which is also given away per the apparel.
Also during this scene, the video chat window of Blaire on the laptop's screen doesn't change at all while Laura is closing it, despite the fact that it's camera is being moved.
The plot is set in motion by a video of Laura having passed out and soiled herself at a party. The film depicts this in enormously explicit detail.
Ken's death is the most gruesome in the film: he shoves his hand into a blender, then uses the blender to slit his own throat.
Jess' death is just as bad, if not worse: she is forced to put a heated curling iron down her throat and writhe as it slowly roasts her to death from the inside out.
One way to take this premise - the entire movie it's kept entirely ambiguous whether this is a ghost or just a hacker messing with the main characters. But no, all horror movies ever nowadays drop any subtly and subtext because they want to be "LOOK AT OUR SUPER AWESOME AND SCARY CGI MONSTER!" A lot of this movie is spent going "yes this is real" which is the exact opposite of what you should be doing in a good horror story like this. Fear of the unknown is a very powerful thing, and when we know what the fuck the monster is and what the fuck it wants, we're stuck with characters idiotically willing to die for selfish reasons.
A lot of fans on Dead Meat's The Kill Count video for Unfriended believe that the ending would have been a lot stronger if Blaire ended up surviving, as then she would have to live with the consequences of not only getting her friends killed, but being exposed for her part in Laura's bullying and suicide, leaving her with her life ruined - much like she ruined Laura's. Not only would it make the ending less cliché than the last minute jumpscare, but it would also be a stronger commentary on the affects of cyberbullying.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: If you're not among those rooting for the antagonist, you're likely feeling indifferent when our main characters die since they're all unrepentant sociopaths to one extent or another.
Unintentional Period Piece: Inevitably, but Tropes Are Not Bad. All the computer programs used are real and the filmmakers showed their work on them, giving the movie a fairly realistic feel for its time even if the technologies used inevitably changed beyond the point of recognition. Nearly all of the websites featured have been redesigned multiple times since 2015, and LiveLeak, an uncensored YouTube alternative where Blaire finds the video of Laura's suicide, went offline in 2021. Culturally, meanwhile, the film depicts Facebook as a teenage hangout, which it was still widely seen as in 2015, but it has since lost many of its younger users to competing sites to the point that, by the '20s, it was widely regarded as a website for their Amazingly Embarrassing Parents instead.
to be taken seriously.