Do Not Open

Director-writer Brian Babarik’s Do Not Open is a study of paranoid horror through a family’s dependency on technology and a computer virus that brings them disastrous results. The perils of screen time and, for some, fear of not being liked on social media can be devastating. What if the digital world had the power of mind control through memory manipulation?

The effective opening sequence is of a lingering still frame of a home at night punctuated by a gunshot. This is followed by a shirtless, slightly bloodied young man walking toward the camera lit by the glow of his mobile phone. The moment segues to blonde young athletic Daughter (Noelle Gutierrez) opening a strange email. The characters in the film have no names, referred to only by their family roles.

“…paranoid horror through a family’s dependency on technology …”

Of course, we know not to open strange emails yet some still do it. In this case, the email launches a virus in the home network, which slowly begins to warp the minds of the family members.This family is each in his or her own digital world, only occasionally, reluctantly interacting with real life. Daughter with her social media and music, Son (Kian Lawson-Khalili) is an online gamer, Mom (Johanna Smitz) loves self-help videos and Dad (Tomas Engström) looks at internet porn.

They sit together to watch TV, but each is on their own device, a situation which is all too real in some homes. Throughout the film you get hints of trauma in each of them, such as Mom suffering some sort of mental health crisis, though she has a perpetual smile on her face. She seems to exist  in a different place where everything is great.

Son is an angry teenager, insolent in his black t-shirt, and lives for online team combat games. Daughter is under pressure from her online social circle to date someone who is crushing on her. Dad is obsessed with a woman from whom he gets suggestive pictures. This later develops into unsavory feelings towards his own daughter.