Catfish

The documentary Catfish has been shrewdly marketed to preserve its surprises; advertisements for the film have avoided even the slightest intimation of what lies at the end of the road started down by New York photographer Nev Schulman when he receives a painting of one of his photographs from Abby, an eight-year old prodigy living in Michigan. Abby, her mother Angela, and her older sister Megan (with whom Nev starts a heavy virtual flirtation) all seem a little too good to be true, and it's easy for the mind to conjure some sort of David Lynchian, Middle American freak show when Nev travels to Michigan in search of the truth about Abby and her family,. Nev is accompanied by his brother Ariel and their friend Henry Joost, the two directors of Catfish. What do three smart, attractive New Yorkers discover when far from home and surrounded by strangers? There must be a con game afoot or the endgame of a grotesque obsession; after all anyone can get on Facebook and be anyone they like. I won't reveal the secrets of Catfish here, but suffice it to say that what the Schulman brothers and Joost discover in Michigan is at once scarier and more moving than they or anyone watching will expect. Catfish is the first film to really make the Internet its subject, as opposed to a plot device or source of cheap thrills. The possibilities for connection, in the first scenes of Nev's attraction to Megan, give way to horror at the almost infinite opportunities for fraud. Megan's presentation of another artist's song as her own is debunked, setting off a series of events that reveal the depths to which the use of the Web as a means of personal expression can be called into question.

It is to the filmmakers' credit that Catfish doesn't turn exploitative once the Michigan secrets are unraveled. Nev, whose participation in the film turns occasionally reluctant, has succumbed not just to Megan's beauty but to the false intimacy of Facebook. His attitude towards what he finds in Michigan could have turned confrontational but is in fact that of someone waking up with an unexplained wound and trying to discover how it happened. Catfish doesn't arrive at any grand statements about the meaning of Facebook; by keeping its focus small it does something far more valuable by holding the mirror up to the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell online.