"I thank God for the catfish."

"Catfish"

Catfish is a film with a secret. What can be said is this: Filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel "Rel" Schulman begin filming the burgeoning friendship between Rel's brother Nev, a Manhattan based photographer, and Abby, an 8 year-old painter from Michigan who first contacts Nev by mailing him a painting of one of his published photos. The two begin to communicate on Facebook. He sends her additional photos for her to use as subjects for her paintings. He not only communicates with her mother, Angela, but also other relatives as well, including her older half-sister, Megan. This relationship with Megan progresses to the point of a tentative romance made complicated by the distance between the two. After an 8 month correspondence, Nev offers to meet the family during a gig in Colorado. And suddenly everything begins to change.

Joost and Schulman hit the narrative doc jackpot on this one and for all the arduous experiences Nev endures you cannot imagine that they didn't fall head over heels madly in love with the emerging weirdness. The film has the momentum and structure of a psychological thriller, inching ever closer to the truth about Megan. It also has a very winning unpolished naturalism. It is not a very "professional" documentary. Joost and Rel weave in and out of their own footage. For better or worse, the suggestion is just that of a bunch of guys playing around with their cameras who happened to have stumbled onto a treasure trove of complex story.

The experience of watching Catfish is addictively tense and surprisingly emotional. Obviously, its press materials which allude to a "shocking twist ending," position it in an interesting way as horror documentary, which is very different but related to the trending documentary style horror. Its finale does indeed boast a surprising number of recurring motifs from American horror cinema myth. An empty barn. A family secret. A "don't go into that house" sense of nervousness. What it captures brilliantly is the anticipatory boogeyman quality of horror. That moment at which anything could be inside that house. And as long as it could be anything we are free to imagine everything which scares us the most. One of the strongest notes in the final act is seeing Nev, standing at Abby's doorstep, ready to confront his mystery and feeling the sudden incredible urge, along with audience, to give it up and just go back.

Catfish's even bigger secret is that it takes us through that door, past the boogeyman phase of nervousness, and portrays with a surprisingly humane tenderness just what lies at the core of this unusual circumstance. Lobbied claims that this is exploitation or belittling to the revealed subjects are ludicrous. No doubt everyone involved was made better by this experience. To discredit sympathetic realism as condescension concludes that all subjects should only be filmed by their peers and that all filmmakers should film only themselves. By this measure all cinema is exploitation. On some level this may be true but in any case, it is not a unique condition of Joost, Schulman, or Catfish.

Ivans smiles