Catfish

"Reality" is reviewed with dramatic cunning by the documentary team that made Catfish, a movie that some might see as a scripted mockumentary, a Blair Witch project for the age of Facebook. It belongs in a fast-growing genre which might be called Faction Documentary, alongside Exit Through the Gift Shop and Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here.

Once upon a movie-making time, NYC-based Ariel Schulman and his friend Henry Joost decided to keep a film record of the long-distance love story that was developing between Ariel's brother, Yaniv (Nev), and an amateur songwriter, Megan. He'd "met" her though his online friendship with her eight-year-old half-sister, child prodigy artist Melanie. She, via her mother Angela Wesselman, had sent Nev her painting of a photograph of his published in the NY Times.

The seemingly talented family lived in rural Michigan. Then the New Yorkers realised that the women had spun online lies, and they next decided to make a side-trip to confront the liars.

It's a clever storyline, involving online detective work, three handsome young men, a lovely young woman, and a precocious child. It develops into a wry tale of sad people, a social-networking tragi-comedy, that is so bizarre, so far beyond the imagination of the freakiest fantasist, that one feels obliges to accept that some of, perhaps most of it, was a really true story which the Schulman brothers (also occasional short-movie actors) re-constructed.

Their project could only succeed with the cooperation of mildly manic middle-aged Angela, and she's a good natural actress and mediocre amateur painter. Her reality is revealed to be harsh, her online escapism system intricate.

No one, even New York movie-makers, would dare to graft truly retarded teenage twin boys onto the story, so they are almost certainly real (and the subsequent death of one is noted in the end credits). All the charades, the film-makers' as well as Angela's, could only exist in the new world of social networking, the world of TwoFaceBook. Inevitably, in a land where many crave online friends and fantasies, and tote multiple cellphones for different aspects of their personalities, the Faction Documentary genre will expand. It's cheap to make and as entertaining as the best of reality TV.