If you live on the Internet you will love this movie.

Spree follows a man called Kurt who does YouTube and streaming while he is a Uber driver, but in this world Uber is called Spree.

Kurt wants to become viral, he wants to make a name for himself in this online world and so he decides one evening to take his Spree car, pick up his customers like he normally would through the app, and then kill them. During this it’s all being live streamed online for his minimal subscribers and watchers to see.

Kurt has a friend called Bobby. Now Bobby is pretty big online and Kurt almost inspires to be like him and wants to collaborate with him to make himself bigger. This comes to a head however when Kurt actually kills Bobby to gain his viewers to make his audience bigger and it’s absolutely insane to watch.

I think the scariest thing about this though is…it’s not an original concept. This sort of thing has been done before. People live stream suicides, murders, and animal abuse all the time to try and get some sort of notoriety. There was a ‘YouTube killer’ who didn’t do his spree online but all his videos were online where he talked about how he felt inferior to other people and how women should be punished for not wanting to be with him. It’s a scary concept that is made so much scarier when you realise it could actually happen and has.

And in the end, Kurt at his highest has about 50,000 viewers, and he is so proud of this because before that he had one or two. But still 50,000 in a world of 8 billion people is nothing, so he did all of this for nothing, and that’s the main thing to take away from this whole movie. How far people will go to gain some form of fame or what they believe is fame in their eyes. You may only have 1000 followers but you might feel like you’re the Queen of England because these people want to follow you. People always say ‘Jesus only had 12 followers so I guess I’m bigger than Jesus’ and that’s just mental.

It’s scary how far people go for Internet fame and just to have a bit of notoriety, but we see at the end of this movie after everything that’s happened that Kurt does gain this need. He does gain the things that he always wanted and it’s disgusting that people who view this stuff will put him on a pedestal and make it seem like it’s an incredible thing when it’s really not. Kurt is not someone that we should idolise or think is great, he is a murderer and should be treated as such, yet people are so sick and twisted online and want to add some excitement to the boring lives they will treat these people like gods.

I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy this movie when I heard about it being a dark comedy and satire, but it was actually really enjoyable. Being someone who lives on social media and is trying to take time away from it more to focus on other things that actually matter in the real world, it’s very scary being able to compare people who are obsessed with followers and subscribers to Kurt and how badly they want to be something when really in the real world they’re nobody.

What do you think of Spree?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding