This is the trailer for Catfish. Note that it uses some pretty creepy music in the back half, with reviews that praise its thrilling nature, particularly the ending. Here is the poster for the same movie. Note the horrific black-on-red color scheme, with that enigmatic tagline: “Don’t tell anyone what it is.” Indeed, most reviews I’ve read on the movie insist that anyone going to see this movie would be better off going in with no prior knowledge. Effectively, this all paints a picture of a very strange and thrilling movie with shocking secrets at its core that would ruin the movie if spoiled. Kinda like The Last Exorcism or Dark City.

This is a lie. The Catfish I saw was not the Catfish advertised to me. Anything close to scary begins and ends with the barn sequence in the trailer. Furthermore, I don’t know what movie the critics in the trailer were watching, but the last forty minutes of the movie I saw were quite purposefully devoid of suspense. I will, however, grant that this movie does have a lot of secrets that are central to its premise and that spoiling them would be a disservice. Allow me to explain, starting from the top.

Catfish focuses on Yaniv “Niv” Schulman, a New York photographer specializing in pictures of dance. His work attracts the attention of Abby, a young painting prodigy in Michigan. They meet online and Niv gradually meets Abby’s entire family on Facebook. Most importantly, he strikes up a long-distance romance with Abby’s older sister, Megan, that gets really heavy really quickly. Yaniv’s roommates, a couple of amateur filmmakers, decide to film a documentary about this online relationship and we thus have our mockumentary.

The movie does a solid job of documenting this internet love affair in an interesting way. I was particularly fond of how the film used Google Earth and Facebook as visual means to advance the story in many clever ways — using Facebook’s photo tags to introduce the characters and their names, for example. What’s more, the film is very good at making the characters relatable and sympathetic, even though so many of them are only voices on a phone, pictures in a computer screen or text in a box.

At first, it seems like everything about Megan and her family is on the level, since there’s no shortage of pictures, text exchanges, songs, paintings and phone conversations between them, posted online and shared with Niv. Of course, things go downhill when some discrepancies start to show. Several lies and stories start to unravel as the movie continues, to the point where Niv and his buddies decide to head on over and separate reality from fiction.

The person behind all of this is finally confronted about it just over halfway through the film. And pretty much nothing comes of it. The film doesn’t suddenly become a mystery thriller and horror of any kind is nowhere to be found. Any suspense that the movie had is killed with the confrontation (that happens mostly offscreen, I might add). From that point onward, the person behind the curtain is completely open and even repentant about what’s been done. The rest of the movie — at least forty minutes — is nothing more than a rundown of the lies, truths, methods and motivations behind the whole charade. It’s all completely and totally mundane.

Ah, but it’s unbecoming to talk about the film I didn’t see. What did I think of the movie that I did see? Well, I thought it was a nice little film. If The Social Network is the story of Facebook’s past, then Catfish is the story of its present. The film isn’t exactly must-see material and it does get heavy-handed at times, but it’s still a competently made and very thoughtful meditation on social networking, its uses, misuses and effects on the lives of those who use it. If any of those issues appeal to you, then you’ll certainly enjoy Catfish and I hope you check it out.