I love this movie so much

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

good back-story, and good acting

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I am going to admit that I had high expectations for this movie from reading the short description that it had, one of my favorite actor is in it, and the decent amount of reviews it had.In reality, this movie did not make a great delivery. Sure, the actors and actresses are pretty great in this movie and the story overall is decent... I just didn't feel very captivated with how the movie was portrayed. It wasn't as interesting as I expected it to be. At some points, it seemed as though the movie was all over the place.This movie, I would recommend to watch anyway because I did like the overall message. The way the movie played out just wasn't that entertaining to me though.

As soon as I finished watching this movie, I made an IMDb account so I could write this review. The movie Chatroom takes place almost entirely online, with the setting being shown in a very unique way on-screen. As the teens log in, we see the internet become personified as a hotel-like place, each door leading to a different room (some locked, some public). The hallways to the rooms are filled with a variety of people, including pedophiles, barely clothed women, men in suits, small children, teens, and every day normal people. The internet is a very diverse place and chatrooms are used by many. Luckily, not all are used in the way it was in this feature.The main character, Will (a seemingly normal, though troubled teen) creates a chatroom and allows only the 4 other characters in to talk to him. Towards the middle of the movie it begins to come to light that Will's intentions for the room are not positive at all. He aims to hurt some of the others, and attempts to convince another to commit suicide. Even though the ending was rather predictable for a movie of this type, I still enjoyed it very much. What made me want to write my ideas on the movie was a review I saw on Netflix about how terrible of a movie this was. I'll be honest, if you're looking for something to keep you on the edge of your seat, this may not be it. However, it's definitely honest. Between 12 and about 17, I frequented chatrooms nearly every night. This movie almost portrays my experience to a t. I was a lonely kid, and I found friends who I thought I could trust and confide in. I came across my fair share of pedophiles and generally bad people. I've seen people bully relentlessly and even tell people to kill themselves until they were forced to leave, hopefully unscathed emotionally. This movie brings to light a harsh reality that youth today are living. With technology so readily available- it is going to be abused. We need to be watching our connections and parental block is definitely your friend if you're a parent. Kids are looking for answers online, and it's not a safe place to be looking at all. Don't get me wrong, I have made lasting relationships through chatrooms. I even lived with a man who I met online, but it isn't worth the risk. I've also been black mailed similarly to how the character tried to black mail the other characters into keeping quiet, the only difference is that I got blackmailed into sending nude pictures while I was underage. These things are happening to teens way more than people realize, because no one is telling you. None of these kids told their parents about what was happening, and none of their parents took action because they didn't think anything was wrong. Chatroom can only be considered a horror if you realize the reality of it.I suppose what I'm really trying to say in this review is, if you watch this movie and read the reviews and read this one, take as much of this movie to heart as you can. It's a reality that you're going to probably have to handle with your kids when you have them, and if you have them now, they may already be involved. They may not be in as bad of a situation, or any situation at all, but stay in the know and keep connected. It's too risky not to. The technology may change, but with every good opportunity, there are just as many bad to counteract it.

Matthew Beard stole the show from Aaron Johnson with pure kick ass acting. The film did a pretty good job of showing how loneliness and pain can bring lots of emotionally crippled people together, and that sometimes that can be good and sometimes not so much. Aaron Johnson, whom I usually enjoy watching, seemed a bit like a one trick pony in this film. I'd have liked to know more about the characters and how they came to be the way they were. It all starts at home, of course, but all the parents seem trivialized, when in fact, they were central to their children's issues. Perhaps this is reality and I'm naive. I did feel very sad for those poor young people and it occurred to me that the internet has opened up an entire world of opportunity for evil people to exploit people looking for a friend. In that regard the film hit its mark by touching upon the dangers of being too busy to notice that children are turning to those who don't have their best interests at heart, and that, thanks to the internet, they can reach a larger audience of creeps than ever before. Hopefully, the reverse is also true...that they can reach a larger audience of heroes than ever before. Maybe someone should make a film about that.

The main thing this film does to play with the the role of a chatroom is of course to play out the online conversation in a kind of etch a sketch hotel that the users decorate at will to reflect their personalities and so forth; this is done well, I thought. it filled in the removal of personal contact and body language, for the viewer's sake, and also provided an insight into the tone of each user's thoughts as they got to know each other and then William's plot unfolded. I thought the content and delivery of the dialogue of the online conversations as acted out in the hotel were actually quite reminiscent of the kind of language used in chatrooms, at least from my own experience; The film struck a chord with me because i spent a few years on chatrooms myself as a teenager; I was lucky, in that I avoided any real contact with weird people, or indeed malevolent entities such as William, and eventually met quite a few of the people i got to know well in real life, and struck up some great friendships, many of which continue to this day. however, i only met and talked to people in chatrooms because i had low self-esteem and was depressed and unsure of myself, the anonymity and control provided by a chatroom appealing to me more then less removed and more traditional forms of socialising; i'm sure a lot of people who use chatrooms have such issues and plenty more besides, which were represented by the film's characters; William and Jim were extreme examples, and the fraught, hysterical plot of William's to drive Jim to suicide culminating in that chase through Camden market seemed a little over the top to me. i did appreciate the way that each character's own personal plot and life was almost entirely mutually exclusive to the central plot of their friendship and interaction in the Chelsea teens room, Eva's room etc. a person's online persona, particularly in a chatroom, is a contrived and carefully constructed thing, and it's a very distanced, protective form of interaction, however personal you may get, as the characters did in the film, to devastating effect. I thought the film's disjointed pace and seemingly inconsequential progression, in the first half at least, was a good portrayal of that compartmentalisation of online chat and personal life.in addition to the bedrock of the main plot that emerges, the tragic lonely depressive characters who self-harm and/or seek solace online, meeting with people who display a variety of different responses from supportive to manipulative and cruel, we're also presented with a cross-section of sexual deviance, from the tolerable and acceptable - a hallway Eva walks through to meet William which is filled with people indulging in fetish, and mo talking to that older lady while other people talk dirty in neighbouring rooms - to the disgusting and unacceptable - mo's paedophilic interest in his mate's 11 year old sister, and the pervert whose entry to Chelsea teens prompts William to set up a password.along with the girl who Jim meets early on and from whom he runs away, using the above, the film seeks to establish the consensus that the world of chatrooms is a forum for the disaffected, deviant and personality-disordered to convene, and of course provides a warning about the dangers of such conference by presenting a group of characters so misguided and/or malevolent that their initially beneficial, well-intended, supportive online friendship leads to a life-or-death situation, which yields one casualty, fortunately not the painfully depressive Jim.all in all, i was impressed by this film, which i consider a worthy, well-made, convincingly acted portrait of the world of chatrooms, the freedoms, connections, pitfalls and traps that can result from such interactions and friendships, and ultimately, the value of real social structure, especially for those who aren't entirely comfortable with it and are driven to seek less direct ways of establishing it. i give the film 8/10