The trailer for Catfish says specifically not to let anyone tell you what happens in the last 40 minutes of the movie. This is because if anyone were to give you even a general idea then you wouldn’t want to see the movie. I am not going to spoil it here because frankly it is too disappointing to bother typing.

I have never seen a movie so deceptively marketed. All the promotional materials for the film heavily implied that the film was thriller/horror movie, some quotes going so far into hyperbole as to say ‘you won’t sleep for three days after seeing this movie’ or ‘the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made.’ These statements are so blatantly false that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that those quotes were meant for another movie and maybe when something like Buried comes out  in wide release it will carry quotes like ‘the ending will leave you yawing’ or ‘what a monumental waste of time.’

The set up for the film is that it is a documentary about a guy who gets into a friendship with an 8-year old girl who paints professional paintings and over the course of 8 months he grows closer to a family he has only ever interacted with online or over the phone. He even goes so far as to become embroiled in a long distance sexting relationship with the girl’s older sister. When some of the details given start to unravel, the guy and his two film making friends decide to go out to surprise the family and find out what is up. And after that is what I am not supposed to tell anyone. What a disappointment.

It isn’t really that the movie itself is bad. There are some feelings of tension and anticipation leading up to the big reveal and it is pretty funny most of the time. The problem is that the resolution is so obvious and unsurprising that you spend most of the last 40 minutes hoping anything else at all would happen. If it turned out that the surprise was that the family was made up of anthropomorphic catfish or a family of Sasquaches I would have been more satisfied because it would have at least been SOMEthing.

I think it is possible that if I were watching A & E some Sunday afternoon and I had never heard about Catfish and it came on I would probably enjoy it well enough. As a documentary it works well enough but when you have paid to see something that is going to keep you up for three days and you are handed this it is a completely disappointing failure. I might not sleep for three days but it is because of how jilted I felt by the experience. I am frankly offended to have laid down $9.50 for this.

The filmmakers swear this is a real documentary and it feels pretty authentic. I would be inclined to disbelieve this but honestly only real life can have such a boring resolution. If it isn’t real then the performances are very good. They feel natural and real. If it is real then I take that back.

It is put together fairly well and I would give it some credit for what suspense it does build up but I have to dock it here too. The suspense that is here exists only because of the marketing campaign. If you were just watching in a vacuum, sure you would wonder what was going on but it would be with as much interest as you would give to an episode of City Confidential or something similar. So when you get down to it, what really works here works because of the marketing but the whole movie fails because of that same marketing. If you remove the marketing and expectations from the project you are left with a less disappointing film but also a less engaging one.

Conclusion [3.5 out of 10]

While I feel like the film itself could be engaging if encountered without expectations it is still a fairly middling effort and I simply can’t recommend something that is such a blatant bait and switch. It is impossible to get excited by the trailer for this and then not feel straight up cheated by the final product. It might be an okay movie on its own but the decision was made to lie about what that movie was and it has mortally wounded the film. My recommendation is to save yourself some time and look the movie up on wikipedia and read the spoilers. You will still be disappointed but at least you’ve saved yourself some money and time that is better spent elsewhere.