OPEN WINDOWS (2014)

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Summary: Nick (Elijah Wood) is a horror movie superfan, so he’s excited when he wins a contest to be flown out to a movie premiere and to have dinner with his favorite scream queen, Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey). When he gets to the hotel set up by the actress’s team, he’s disappointed to hear that the whole thing has been canceled and he will not, in fact, be going on a date with the actress, who he runs a fansite for.

Instead, a mysterious chat window pops up on his computer, and someone claiming to be her agent gives him access to something he most assuredly should not have access to — Jill’s devices. He can see her every move through her cell phone camera and her laptop webcam. The superfan now has more access to the object of his obsession than ever, and at first he’s intrigued, unsure about the morality of using any of this information for his website about the actress. But it soon becomes apparent that Jill is the target of a terrifying plot on her life, and Nick is forced to watch, passively, behind his computer screen as she is stalked and preyed upon.

Can he help her? He shouldn’t know any of this is happening, so can he act on it? Even if he wanted to, he’s stuck on the other end of a screen, as we are stuck on the other side of the film screen. Can he break through to influence the events he’s being forced to watch unfold? Can we? What happens if he’s forced to participate in Jill’s torture? Or maybe, is he participating in the violation of this woman just by watching? …Are we?

Why it’s worth watching: As much a meditation on obsessive fandom as it is on technology, Open Windows deals with the questionable morality of celebrity culture in an age where everything celebrities do is blasted across dozens of social media sites clamoring for images of stars in compromising positions.

At the beginning of the film, Nick is livestreaming a press conference about Jill’s upcoming film. Every time the camera cuts to her, he takes near-constant screenshots with the intent of uploading them to his site’s comprehensive image gallery. Combined with the ever-present window showing Nick through his webcam, looking a little pale, a little sickly, a little sweaty, we get an immediate sense of the character as somewhat of a degenerate, a creepy little fellow who sits around obsessing over an actress on the Internet instead of having a real life.

But who among us hasn’t ever seen screenshots of celebrities, or photos of famous people at promotional events? I know I sure have. Vaguely, I know that there’s someone, somewhere, who sits around collecting and collating these hundreds of thousands of images of Lady Gaga, but I don’t often think about what kind of person they must be. If I want to be reminded of a specific outfit or performance, I just go to that site and pull up a photo. Social media allows me to be more of a voyeur than ever. I can plug in and see where my favorite celebrities are and what they’re doing, and whatever it is, I can probably find candid pictures of them doing it. Am I somehow less responsible for this invasion of privacy, because I’m not actually the one physically taking the images? Or, in a way, and I even more responsible? These are the questions Open Windows wants us to ask ourselves.