Parents' Guide to Don't Log Off

Don't Log Off is a competent time capsule of pandemic lockdown anxiety, but it may be something some prefer not to revisit. Like another friends-on-Zoom suspense film, Host, it's set and shot early in the pandemic. Although the film opens with a conventional shooting style, the bulk of it appears as it would on a laptop or mobile phone. We witness both the filmmakers and their fictional characters struggling with lockdown restrictions. When Sam goes missing and the police won't help, her friends use digital-era skills to deduce where she might be and who might be harming her. It's a good idea, but not all of the logic tracks. Did someone get abducted simply because a violent stalker was randomly waiting outside her door? Much of what we learn is through reading typed messages, not the most dramatic method for engaging an audience. Questions arise: why do they keep going to save Sam from danger alone, without backup? Why do they keep going without weapons? Why does no one turn the lights on? By the time the third friend has unsuccessfully gone to look for Sam, one is reminded that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

This movie is made possible by the fact that as the public has accepted the shrinkage of movie-viewing formats all the way down to pocket-sized phones, it has also become comfortable with socializing by way of video conferencing apps. This piece shows that the restrictions of quarantine can spur an inventive solution to the problem of how to get actors interacting at a time of deadly germ threat. But does this satisfy us the way a movie ought to? No. It's a novelty, like a dog walking on its hind legs. It's interesting for a few minutes. Then you really want the dog to do something else.