Chatroom

In 2006, Irish writer Enda Walsh's one-hour play, Chatroom, was first staged at London's National Theatre. The prolific playwright was best known till then for his screenplay adaptation of another of his short plays, Disco Pigs (2001), but he gained more attention internationally for his co-writing of Steve McQueen's harrowing Hunger (2008). He then expanded his older NT-commissioned tale of five youngsters trapped in an Internet chat room by fifty per cent. It was a movie-length version for Japanese horror director Hideo Nakata (the Ringu/Ring franchise, Dark Water).

Nakata signed up UK-resident film editor Masahiro (Duchess) Hirakubu, who'd worked on Danny Boyle movies from Trainspotting onwards. Music was composed by Kenji Kawai, working on his fifth movie with Nakata. The all-important cinematography was entrusted to another veteran, Frenchman Benoit Delhomme (The Proposition, Merchant of Venice, Shanghai). The young lead actors had good track records too, but something went disastrously wrong with the supposed fantasy thriller.

Four North London youngsters have been attracted into a chatroom set up by William (Aaron Kick-Ass Johnson), a teenager just completing a year of psychiatric counselling with his parents. An older more successful brother may account for his mean-minded depression and Internet escapism. The online world is depicted as a lushly-coloured brightly-mildewed corridor leading through a mass of celebratory, noisy, happy party-goers to private rooms for shared visions. By contrast, the teenagers' real lives (failed parents, mental problems, sexual frustrations and lack of confidence) are photographed in dull shades, even on location in London Zoo, and Camden's canal and market.

A weakly, fatherless white boy Matthew (When Did You Last See Your Father? Beard) is on anti-depressants, a black teen (Daniel Skins Kaluuya) fancies an underage girl, an almost manic dim girl (Hannah Murray, another Skins graduate) hates her parents, and another girl (Imogen 28 Weeks Later Potts) has the hots for William, admiring his aggressive, jolly online personality, supporting his evil games with the other three chatters entering the room. The screenplay focuses on William's efforts to drive the pill-popping boy to commit suicide; the other characters aren't developed.

The appearance of a middle-aged paedophile pretending to be a young girl is another waste of screen time, designed perhaps to remind the audience that chatrooms aren't only the realm of dangerously disturbed teenagers. Johnson can still look a teen, but Potts cannot and the make-up department adds smudges and shadows that age her even more than may be natural.

None of the teens, or the parents, are credible characters. That wouldn't matter so much if the film were a fast-paced psychological thriller with menacing tensions. Nor would it be off-putting if the movie had arthouse pretensions of being a 21st Century tribute to Cocteau. But it isn't even a credible dramatic representation of chatroom texting and bombast, or cyber bullying.

As a short play, Chatroom must have had a style and content that worked well in a small theatre. They haven't been transferred effectively to the world of movies.