Fantasia Fest 2021: ‘#Blue_Whale’ documents suicidal ideation & dangers of social media

Trigger Warning: the film depicts graphic acts of suicide and cutting

In 2017, Michelle Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her suicidal boyfriend to kill himself. An entirely different case in 2019 detailed a devastating incident in which a young man flung himself from the top floor of a parking garage, and texts revealed his girlfriend, frequently emotionally abusive, told him to “die in hell.” Such real-life tragedies become the backbone of Anna Zaytseva’s #Blue_Whale, produced by Screenlife, the company behind Unfriended and Searching. True to found footage, the Russian film documents the lives of suicidal teens through phone and laptop video, sucking the viewer into the ravaging mental and emotional whirlpool. It is relentless in its imagery, showcasing explicit suicides and conversation around suicide, to underscore the implications of online vitriol to one’s mental stability.

In the aftermath of her sister Yulya’s suicide, Dana (Anna Potebnya) follows various breadcrumbs, from Yulya’s cryptic posts about whales to a live feed of her final moments, into a lethal online game called Blue Whale. Once she enters the dark underworld, and becomes a member of a private Netbook group, Dana is given a sequence of tasks; those include writing out her three biggest fears, drawing her pain, and dodging oncoming traffic. In one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, she is even instructed to slit her wrists, and when she attempts to cheat (googling “slashed wrists” and sharing a fake photo), lead “curator” Ada Morte boots her from the game. Under pressure to find answers for her sister’s death, Dana proceeds to take a blade to her wrists and videos the act to prove her commitment to the game.

That’s only scraping the surface, no pun intended, of what the film portrays. Quieter moments, such as Dana deleting most of her Facebook friends, signifying her emotional detachment from the world, pack just as much of a punch. The tasks grow riskier and more deadly, leading up to Dana’s “exodus” date (aka her suicide). Amidst all this psychological warfare, Dana befriends a fellow gamer named Lesha (Timofey Yeletskiy), who’s turned to the online world to cope with the waning health of his sickly, bed-ridden mother. The two strike up a quick and severe infatuation, indicating that, perhaps, things really do get better. “I can give you one hundred reasons to live,” Dana tells Lesha during one of many video calls.

#Blue_Whale is not for the faint of heart. As one with suicidal ideation myself, I found it to be terribly triggering, yet somehow cathartic and emotional. It’s one of those films that’s wholly necessary in continuing to de-stigmatize mental health, while also being a wonderfully frightful film in its own right. “You don’t fucking want to die. You want someone to feel sorry for you, weep and realize they were wrong when you’ll be gone,” Dana pleads with another player, on the verge of leaping from a building. “It doesn’t mean you’re the problem if nobody loves you. The problem is them.”

The film further analyzes the role of social media in mental health through power dynamics between celebrities and ordinary people. One of Ada Morte’s henchmen is named Lana Del Rey (or Luna Del Ray in some instances, perhaps a translation mistake, as Eric Langberg for Medium suggests) who frequently urges users to kill themselves. This directly mirrors a trend among popular artists like Lana Del Rey, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj who have intentionally or unintentionally sicced their massive online fanbases on music critics. “The line between fandom and mob has been a fine one,” writes Jordan Julian for The Daily Beast. It’s a potentially hazardous, life-threatening line which begs the question: are we as a society to blame?

Between 2007 and 2018, the suicide rate for those aged 10-24 increased by a whopping 60 percent. The answer to the question is an unequivocal: yes. A film like #Blue_Whale captures the dire state of today’s youth in a way that feels raw and honest. The real tragedy here is how often we see countless deaths happening right in front of our eyes through black screens, but we’re so desensitized to it we simply scroll right on by. #Blue_Whale confronts these ideas with a sledgehammer and forces the viewer to question their own role in all of this. It’s moving, gritty, and will chill you to the bone.

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