I'm sort of out of place in terms of reviewing this, seeing it only for the first time 10 years after its initial release and already knowing what it's about and how the term has entered common vocabulary and taken on vaguely malicious, sexual tone..
I wasn't anticipating it to be malicious or sexual at all. I wasn't really expecting much in the way of surprise. And yet the first and biggest surprise that hit me was that very, very early on in the documentary, or at least what we are shown, they already figure out that "Megan" and/or "Angela" is "catfishing" them, pretending to be someone they are not, and even pretending that their daughter is an art prodigy.
It feels a bit mean to call her a liar, because while she is lying, it's almost entirely within the scope of what should be a private, personal exchange between two people. If I tell a friend a joke they never heard before and tell them I invented it, I am not maliciously harming anyone in the process of this.
As well, the conventional experience of people online in the 90s and 2000s was always with one or more people making online girlfriends/boyfriends, complete with fake pictures of other people being passed off as them. It's become a trope since then and now that has come and gone and been so overly used that it is almost more of a joke for someone to fall for this rather than the "catfish" attempt itself.
As it happens in this film, Nev and his brother Ariel catch on seemingly right away that "Megan" is lying to them, as she posts song covers she claims she performed herself, which are actually covers done by other people easily backtraced via Youtube.
From this point, the entire onus of the "scam" in terms of Megan/Angela falls apart, at least insofar as I think. Unless information was left out of the final cut of the film, at no point does Megan/Angela try to scam Nev out of anything, nor try to arrange any real life meetup or anything of the sort. Instead, Nev takes it upon himself to actively seek out more information on Megan/Angela, given the tidbits of information they had given him over the several months of correspondences.
From there, Nev comes to the conclusion that most, if not all of the information given is false. There is no horse farm that they own, there is no art gallery where the daughter Abby is selling paintings for thousands of dollars, etc and so on.
So far, this is nowhere near anything outrageous or outlandish for a mid-late-2000s internet resident to be doing. People lying about themselves online is practically older than the internet itself. It becomes a fun fantasy to indulge in for people looking to escape the horrors or mundanities of their real lives and in the mid-late-2000s, the internet and in particular social media had grown and reached a stage far beyond the endless niche forums and small chatrooms of the 90s and engage with one another much more easily and in-depth.
Indeed, doing the background research to discover Megan/Angela's lies isn't even out of the ordinary or unusual for Nev to do. Where the film really seems to escalate into something more than just a "Dang I got suckered in by a girl online" is when Nev and Ariel actively go to Megan's house and are literally knocking on her door, completely uninvited and unexpected, with flowers.
To be clear, by this point, Nev and Ariel have already figured out that Megan/Angela is lying and may not even be real. They have long since gone past the point of suspicion and almost into the realm of harassment at this point.
What was obvious since probably about 10-15 minutes into the documentary is laid bare at this point; "Megan" isn't real. Angela is not young and sexy, but is a 40 year old overweight wife and mother whose days are occupied by raising two daughters and two severely disabled sons who rely on her for everything. Her daughter Abby doesn't paint; Angela does. Her husband thinks she's been selling her paintings to Nev over Facebook. Angela has been maintaining multiple Facebook accounts with pictures taken from other accounts and essentially living a fantasy life with them all and including Nev into it.
Now that Nev has confronted her in real life, he goes about for some 15-20 minutes of screentime slowly and viscerally dragging out the humiliation and embarrassment of Angela, slowly and cringe-inducingly prying information first out of Abby, getting the confused 8 year old to blab that she doesn't even paint and it's her mom who paints all the time, then forcing a panicked Angela to try to save her crashing fantasy world with some impromptu Facebook messages from "Megan" and some other characters claiming they can't meet up with Nev after his sudden drop-in, as "Megan" just checked herself into rehab for alcoholism.
The truth is finally gouged out slowly, after almost a full day and a half of activities with Nev and Ariel and Angela's family, reducing Angela to tears at a ponyride with him getting her to admit to everything.
From there on, we get some very uncomfortable conversations and further sort of "exposition dumps" about Angela and the entire experience. Everything I wrote about Angela above is revealed by her and her husband. Mercifully, Nev seems not to tell her husband about the almost-erotic romantic fantasizing "Angela" and Nev had shared over texts before it all unraveled. Imagining them watching this documentary years afterward and seeing that particular scene, with Ariel and Nev goofily laughing hysterically all throughout, is almost traumatizing just to imagine.
While everything seems tied up neatly at the end, with Angela and Nev supposedly even still friends on Facebook and Angela dropping her entire charade and going by her own self on Facebook, it all feels like something is missing, like the seeds of some future traumatic incident has been laid as a result.
Nev does not come out of this looking like a good-natured innocent victim here. He puts on that persona as much as he can, but all the actions he took, actively going and tracking her down and confronting her, feel almost maliciously deliberate. He never once showed any sort of anger or sadness over the mild "catfishing", but the almost outrageous actions he took feel like a deliberate and targeted punishment aimed at exposing and humiliating this woman for wanting to have fun and make a meaningful connection online that was not available to her in real life.
The documentary does not come across angry, like a "How dare she lie about herself online!" or even as a derogatory "Look at this freak pretending to be hot!" but more like a "Hey, check this out, this woman's pretending to be something she's not, isn't this peculiar?" It passes no judgment, but instead elevates a random, private individual onto a worldwide stage for all us random jerks, goons, and goblins to pass judgment on ourselves.
This woman is not a creepy, awful woman we should all be careful of online, nor did she commit anything even remotely criminal or harmful in the process of this "catfishing" and yet, because of the person she befriended and opened up to online, she is now immortalized on film, held up as a sideshow in a weird little carnival of humiliation for everyone to laugh at, yell at, or feel sorry for, however we choose.
I am not bothered or perturbed by any actions taken by Angela all throughout this film (at least insofar as what was shown to me). Nothing I saw her do hasn't been done hundreds of thousands of times before her and after her, by people of all types, some of them doing it to harass, others to scam, and others just for fun and friendship.
I do not want to have to feel sorry for this woman. She did not deserve to be put on display in front of us all. Whether or not she agreed to it all and came to embrace the bit of fame the film shown on her is irrelevant because at the time of the events being filmed, she had no idea that her online friend was in the process of tracking her down, going to her house, and barging in on her family and her life to confront her with all the harmless fantasies she constructed for herself online.
I wasn't anticipating it to be malicious or sexual at all. I wasn't really expecting much in the way of surprise. And yet the first and biggest surprise that hit me was that very, very early on in the documentary, or at least what we are shown, they already figure out that "Megan" and/or "Angela" is "catfishing" them, pretending to be someone they are not, and even pretending that their daughter is an art prodigy.
It feels a bit mean to call her a liar, because while she is lying, it's almost entirely within the scope of what should be a private, personal exchange between two people. If I tell a friend a joke they never heard before and tell them I invented it, I am not maliciously harming anyone in the process of this.
As well, the conventional experience of people online in the 90s and 2000s was always with one or more people making online girlfriends/boyfriends, complete with fake pictures of other people being passed off as them. It's become a trope since then and now that has come and gone and been so overly used that it is almost more of a joke for someone to fall for this rather than the "catfish" attempt itself.
As it happens in this film, Nev and his brother Ariel catch on seemingly right away that "Megan" is lying to them, as she posts song covers she claims she performed herself, which are actually covers done by other people easily backtraced via Youtube.
From this point, the entire onus of the "scam" in terms of Megan/Angela falls apart, at least insofar as I think. Unless information was left out of the final cut of the film, at no point does Megan/Angela try to scam Nev out of anything, nor try to arrange any real life meetup or anything of the sort. Instead, Nev takes it upon himself to actively seek out more information on Megan/Angela, given the tidbits of information they had given him over the several months of correspondences.
From there, Nev comes to the conclusion that most, if not all of the information given is false. There is no horse farm that they own, there is no art gallery where the daughter Abby is selling paintings for thousands of dollars, etc and so on.
So far, this is nowhere near anything outrageous or outlandish for a mid-late-2000s internet resident to be doing. People lying about themselves online is practically older than the internet itself. It becomes a fun fantasy to indulge in for people looking to escape the horrors or mundanities of their real lives and in the mid-late-2000s, the internet and in particular social media had grown and reached a stage far beyond the endless niche forums and small chatrooms of the 90s and engage with one another much more easily and in-depth.
Indeed, doing the background research to discover Megan/Angela's lies isn't even out of the ordinary or unusual for Nev to do. Where the film really seems to escalate into something more than just a "Dang I got suckered in by a girl online" is when Nev and Ariel actively go to Megan's house and are literally knocking on her door, completely uninvited and unexpected, with flowers.
To be clear, by this point, Nev and Ariel have already figured out that Megan/Angela is lying and may not even be real. They have long since gone past the point of suspicion and almost into the realm of harassment at this point.
What was obvious since probably about 10-15 minutes into the documentary is laid bare at this point; "Megan" isn't real. Angela is not young and sexy, but is a 40 year old overweight wife and mother whose days are occupied by raising two daughters and two severely disabled sons who rely on her for everything. Her daughter Abby doesn't paint; Angela does. Her husband thinks she's been selling her paintings to Nev over Facebook. Angela has been maintaining multiple Facebook accounts with pictures taken from other accounts and essentially living a fantasy life with them all and including Nev into it.
Now that Nev has confronted her in real life, he goes about for some 15-20 minutes of screentime slowly and viscerally dragging out the humiliation and embarrassment of Angela, slowly and cringe-inducingly prying information first out of Abby, getting the confused 8 year old to blab that she doesn't even paint and it's her mom who paints all the time, then forcing a panicked Angela to try to save her crashing fantasy world with some impromptu Facebook messages from "Megan" and some other characters claiming they can't meet up with Nev after his sudden drop-in, as "Megan" just checked herself into rehab for alcoholism.
The truth is finally gouged out slowly, after almost a full day and a half of activities with Nev and Ariel and Angela's family, reducing Angela to tears at a ponyride with him getting her to admit to everything.
From there on, we get some very uncomfortable conversations and further sort of "exposition dumps" about Angela and the entire experience. Everything I wrote about Angela above is revealed by her and her husband. Mercifully, Nev seems not to tell her husband about the almost-erotic romantic fantasizing "Angela" and Nev had shared over texts before it all unraveled. Imagining them watching this documentary years afterward and seeing that particular scene, with Ariel and Nev goofily laughing hysterically all throughout, is almost traumatizing just to imagine.
While everything seems tied up neatly at the end, with Angela and Nev supposedly even still friends on Facebook and Angela dropping her entire charade and going by her own self on Facebook, it all feels like something is missing, like the seeds of some future traumatic incident has been laid as a result.
Nev does not come out of this looking like a good-natured innocent victim here. He puts on that persona as much as he can, but all the actions he took, actively going and tracking her down and confronting her, feel almost maliciously deliberate. He never once showed any sort of anger or sadness over the mild "catfishing", but the almost outrageous actions he took feel like a deliberate and targeted punishment aimed at exposing and humiliating this woman for wanting to have fun and make a meaningful connection online that was not available to her in real life.
The documentary does not come across angry, like a "How dare she lie about herself online!" or even as a derogatory "Look at this freak pretending to be hot!" but more like a "Hey, check this out, this woman's pretending to be something she's not, isn't this peculiar?" It passes no judgment, but instead elevates a random, private individual onto a worldwide stage for all us random jerks, goons, and goblins to pass judgment on ourselves.
This woman is not a creepy, awful woman we should all be careful of online, nor did she commit anything even remotely criminal or harmful in the process of this "catfishing" and yet, because of the person she befriended and opened up to online, she is now immortalized on film, held up as a sideshow in a weird little carnival of humiliation for everyone to laugh at, yell at, or feel sorry for, however we choose.
I am not bothered or perturbed by any actions taken by Angela all throughout this film (at least insofar as what was shown to me). Nothing I saw her do hasn't been done hundreds of thousands of times before her and after her, by people of all types, some of them doing it to harass, others to scam, and others just for fun and friendship.
I do not want to have to feel sorry for this woman. She did not deserve to be put on display in front of us all. Whether or not she agreed to it all and came to embrace the bit of fame the film shown on her is irrelevant because at the time of the events being filmed, she had no idea that her online friend was in the process of tracking her down, going to her house, and barging in on her family and her life to confront her with all the harmless fantasies she constructed for herself online.