Catfish

Many documentaries this year have been a little odd, simply by virtue of the fact it is hard to tell if they are telling the truth, a story, or a mixture of both. I’m Still Here’s creators revealed that it was staged and lingering doubts remain as to the veracity of Exit through Gift Shop. Catfish continues this thread right to the end of the year, with its tale of a young man who encounters a remarkable family through the wonder of internet, only to discover that they are remarkable for very different reasons.

For a film that advertises itself as a real life online mystery, it starts simply and sweetly enough after a New York photographer encounters Abigail, an apparently extremely talented eight-year-old artist, over the internet. He asks his brother and friend to create a documentary based upon their correspondence that, luckily for them, later spirals out of control. Soon an entire group of family and friends emerge, all of whom seem to be doing rather well, with a strange online relationship blooming between him and Abigail’s older sister Megan. However, this whole period in the film does seem a little weird, with the fact that it takes eight months for them to smell a rat seeming suspicious in itself, and indeed one cannot help but question how much of this is true. It is, of course, possible that, as the filmmakers claim, this was all real, but it seems more probable that at least some of this was faked or that they deliberately allowed things to get to the stage were a more interesting film could be made. This leads into the second point of controversy: the fact that many consider that they went to worrying lengths in the making of the picture, which are morally dubious at best, and make the film quite disturbing but not necessarily in the way it intends to be.

However, this said the film maintains curiosity and interest, with the mystery they seek to uncover proving fascinating throughout, while its central concept of lies and deceit adds layer upon layer of intrigue. The film’s final reveal lives up to expectations, proving both worthwhile and genuinely worrying. In many aspects, though, this all plays second fiddle with perhaps the most interesting questions raised instead by the actions of its creators, whose obsession and drive are perhaps more absorbing and disturbing as what they are attempting to document. They become the central figures of curiosity, failing to keep any distance from the subject as they engage with audience complicity into morally dubious acts to uncover the truth.

Catfish is undoubtedly a piece of fascinating and troubling filmmaking, with its creators’ dubious methods and the line between fiction and reality becoming blurred, becoming in many respects more fascinating and involving then what’s being documented. Yet at the end of the day, this maybe the whole point in a film that is, after all, entirely about deceit.

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