The young Nikki is embarrassed and gets into her room. In the darkness, something mysterious threatens. She tries to escape, but it is useless. At the reception for Nikki’s funeral, Alice, her best friend, joins the other four friends of the heart. One of them, Cody, explains that Nikki was lately strange, something obviously worried her. The night after, Alice finds on the phone an invitation to play with a new app: The invitation comes from Nikki’s phone. Perplexed, Alice calls to Cody: he also received the same invitation. Despite Cody telling her she did not download the app, Alice finished the phone call and received a reminder from Nikki’s phone, accepting the invitation and downloading the app. It is immediately contacted by the mysterious and virtual Mr. Bedevil. It looks like an innocuous game, but Alice soon becomes aware that this is not the case. And also his friends.
Everyone is faced with a horror that seems to know long about them.
The use of mobile phones as a propagating means of horror had already been proposed in the Japanese series generated by The Call – Do not respond, then redispaged in Hollywood as a Unanswered Call (not to mention the South Korean Phone). The years have passed and now, in the era of smartphones, the concept is updated with the introduction of a specific app. Things do not change much, from a narrative point of view. The app recalls the real fears that each of the guys feels in her underwear and uses them to terrorize them. So the film alternates mostly visual horror sequences where these fears are staged in colloquial scenes where teenagers, as in a novel by Stephen King, discuss how to deal with the ultrasound threat.
Some scenes can significantly induce discomfort and the loss of characters – like in the desperate escape of Cody in a labyrinthine subway station – but the mechanism tends to repeat itself by reproaching each individual character to the perils with the threats emerging From the actions of the mysterious being derived from the app. All in darkness is too artifacts and insist on being effective and credible in creating a macabre atmosphere.