The possibility that this documentary has been faked – or semi-faked, or restaged, or sneakily improved in the edit – is infuriating. It really is an intriguing modern tale of communication, intimacy, self-knowledge and the web: a great companion to The Social Network. Even if it were presented as fiction, it would still be startling, but had the film-makers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman pitched it that way to a hard-faced Hollywood executive, he might have sunk it just by wondering about the absence of Skype. Of this, more in a moment.
Cinema audiences have recently experienced Joaquin Phoenix's hip-hop career in I'm Still Here, and the startling pop art works of "Mr Brainwash" in Banksy's tongue-in-cheek film Exit Through the Gift Shop, so can be forgiven for scepticism. There's actually a night-time sequence in Catfish, during which scary things are picked out with crude directional lighting in pitch-darkness, clearly influenced by that famous docu-style horror The Blair Witch Project. Yet this is a question of style, not substance. One must be careful of naive cynicism: stranger-than-fiction things happen all the time.
Catfish has been produced by Andrew Jarecki, whose directorial feature Capturing the Friedmans perhaps resembles this in that we seem ourselves to witness the directors following their noses and finding the story. This turns out to be a disturbing tale which also reminded me of Amir Bar-Lev's 2007 documentary about child art, My Kid Could Paint That. The star is a handsome, good-natured guy called Nev (pronounced "Neev") Schulman: a New York-based photographer and documentarist, specialising in filming dance theatre; in late 2008, he was sharing office space with his brother Ariel and Henry Joost, who were on the lookout for new projects. A startling package addressed to Nev one day appears to have inspired Ariel and Henry to pick up their digital cameras and start filming. Who knew where this might lead?
The package contained a painted copy of a photo of dancers Nev had published in a New York paper. With it was a note: the painting was by an eight-year-old girl called Abby, who lived in Michigan. Charmed, Nev wrote back to thank her; a Facebook correspondence began. But just when we might worry about this being inappropriate, these worries are neutralised – possibly – by Abby's mum getting in touch, and then Abby's twentysomething sister Megan, via Facebook. Nev is soon incessantly in contact with them by phone, instant-messaging and Facebook – no webcam stuff though. Perhaps because, at some level, he still does not take this extraordinary situation seriously, or believe that it is really happening, or because he is excited by its very randomness, Nev has not so far insisted on seeing his mysterious correspondents face-to-face. But when he decides to journey out to Michigan with Henry and Ariel for a visit, the story lurches in a strange, scary new direction.
Communication technology assists and obstructs the movies in different ways: the anonymous phone call has been a staple of the thriller for decades; yet now thrillers all need some panicky character to say: "Dammit! I can't get a signal!" before an otherwise traditional plot may proceed, and our increased visibility and traceability in the web age have arguably hindered storytelling still further – it will perhaps nurture a new boom in 1980s period pre-internet movies. Catfish is full of design touches taken from the web: Google Maps and Google Earth show the leading figures' respective locations in New York and Michigan. We zoom down on to the streets and see what things look like with Google Street View. The internet is theoretically making Abby and her family vividly and instantly real even though they're hundreds of miles away, but it's precisely because an elaborate, visually detailed reality can so easily be conjured up via the web that it is so treacherous.
David Fincher's The Social Network imagined the genesis of Facebook as a painful breakup experienced by its inventor, Mark Zuckerberg, and shrewdly suggested that Facebook's popularity lies in allowing its users to regulate their contact with other people, to present and manipulate an image of themselves in ways previously available only to celebrities. This is the creepy side of Facebook and the web in general, amplified in Catfish. I don't think Catfish is a fake: the hidden story is all too plausible. But I do get the sense that Nev and the directors suspected or maybe even discovered the exact truth far earlier than they are letting on here. But never mind. Catfish keeps you on the edge of the seat, and it's an eerie introduction to a new web-driven emotion. Staring into the computer picture of other people's lives is like gazing into an abyss: you get digital vertigo.
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