When I saw Netflix describe this film as gory in the tagline I assumed the worst and prepared myself for lots of moments of muting the film and turning away from the screen, however the gory tagline didn’t come to fruition for me, and really I was expecting Saw level stuff and this was very tame.

Untraceable looks at a killer who has a website that uses many vulnerable IP addresses to make sure they can never be taken down. We follow the FBI as they try to hunt down this killer who uses the view count on his website, while he is live streaming the killing, to influence whether the person dies quicker or slower. The more views it gets the quicker the person dies and slowly a pattern starts to form around who the killer is and why he is targeting the people he is.

The main character we follow is Jennifer who is an FBI agent working on this case who has a young daughter and lives with her mum. There were hints towards her daughter becoming a victim but thankfully this didn’t come to fruition as it seems the killer did have some morals about the type of people who were killed or it didn’t fit his mission statement as to why he was attacking those people. I especially enjoyed following the FBI in the hunt for this killer, even when it came to the death of one of their own men, as well as learning more about the killer’s psyche and why he is doing what he is doing.

It’s interesting to think that this film was created in 2008 and the Internet was still quite new, and so being able to create different websites that could harbour any sort of information or footage that we want was still a big thing. YouTube was only three years old at this point and so to see the killer using the Internet to be able to broadcast his killings was fantastic and really paid homage to the reason why he was doing it in the first place. I don’t want to give spoilers in this review because I think going into it blind gives it so much more excitement, but I really enjoyed the parallels between why the killer is doing what he’s doing and how that influenced how he killed these people.

I highly recommend this film and I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Of course going into it thinking it was going to be super gory tainted my opinion about it especially when the first thing that the killer kills is a cat, and I love cats, so going into it I was a bit concerned but as it went on and I realised that things weren’t going to be as bad as I thought and I really got into the story. Seeing it unfold in front of me and constantly wondering who the killer was and what could be going on and who the next victim was really interesting. I don’t think it’s too of its time, yes it is 14 years old now, but despite the technology it still holds up. It’s a brilliant piece of commentary on the public‘s psyche and how much we want to see people go through the worst things in the world because of our morbid curiosity and don’t think about the consequences of doing just that.

What do you think of Untraceable?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

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