Metacritic reviews

The relationship between “Melody” and “Bilel” (also an assumed name) shows the slippery nature of performed online identities, the leveraging of personal grievances into political/terrorist action, and how the immense scale of social media can essentially collectivize and weaponize alienation and anger from around the world into real world terror.

While the gloss of studio thrillers allow enough distance that we can sit back and be entertained by what’s on screen, Profile’s desktop setting makes Amy’s situation all the more immediate, because it feels so authentic. The film is proof that ScreenLife isn’t just a gimmick, but a cinematic tool we ought to be taking seriously.

The story is told entirely on a computer screen, through skype, social media and editing programs. And despite the restrictions of this device, the film crackles with tension.

Even at its most absurd, the movie is chilled by an ominous and ever-present feeling that the world has become smaller than we ever thought possible, and that real nightmares are waiting for us on the other side of every window.

As much as Bekmambetov is able to maintain a sense of impending doom, the revelations are predictable, even if the means through which we learn them are clever.

Bekmambetov’s cumulatively hysterical film begins as a study of terror before lurching into something closer to horror.

Profile is a pretty conventional thriller with pretty conventional stereotypes.

No matter where he goes, even when he’s working in a subgenre he helped build, Bekmambetov loses himself in the pixels.

In terms of sustaining a narrative using only FaceTime, Skype, Facebook, video downloads and various other web pages and social media platforms, Profile is quite impressive up to a point. In terms of coherent plotting and plausibility, not so much. That means that as the storytelling falls apart, the online framework devolves into a labored tech gimmick, and a visually tiresome one at that.

Still, there’s something about Screenlife that’s not just gimmicky — like the found-footage craze that preceded it — but numbing. All this technological terrorism should be terrifying, but it mostly just feels like eyestrain.