[SXSW 2024] THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK -- Sleek Documentary Is Too Broad To Engage

Review by Sean Boelman

Credit: Netflix

Not to be confused with the book that inspired last year’s GameStop stock movie Dumb Money, the documentary The Antisocial Network is being billed as an “elaboration” on Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini’s Feels Good Man. However, this feels much more like a broadening than an elaboration, with an overly broad scope that prevents the film from being as impactful as it should be.

The movie explores the development and use of the website 4Chan, which started as a relatively harmless website for a particular niche of nerdom but soon evolved into something much more sinister. Although it seems that Jones and Angelini want to pull back the curtain on the notorious forum, they only succeed in asking questions that go unanswered.

There is a fascinating thesis at the core of The Antisocial Network, but the argument is frustratingly timid and unfocused. Although the film asks some interesting questions about the toxicity of online culture and the use of technology to indoctrinate young people, this is the type of documentary that skirts by on “there are no easy answers” instead of interrogating the culpable institutions.

Part of the issue with The Antisocial Network is the inherent anonymity of 4Chan. Feels Good Man worked so well because it gave the audience an incredibly compelling central subject to empathize with. This is missing from The Antisocial Network. The closest we get is Christopher Poole (aka moot), but he’s not the central subject of the story.

Jones and Angelini also paint with much broader strokes here than in Feels Good Man. The alt-right movement that was born out of 4Chan is a much larger counterculture than that which appropriated Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol. Yet the filmmakers seem unwilling to assign any blame here. The central question seems to be whether the technology is responsible or simply the bad people who misuse it, and the movie feels shockingly soft on both.

Worse yet, with a runtime of less than 90 minutes, there simply isn’t enough time to explore this topic in depth. There are enough angles to this story that a miniseries could easily be made about technology's role in the proliferation of dangerous ideology. Condensing every perspective into the length of a single feature causes it to feel like a cursory introduction to these ideas.

Still, the presentation of the film is certainly sleek. The success of Feels Good Man allowed this project to garner Netflix's interest, and the result is more animation, a more energetic soundtrack, and more polish as a whole. It’s certainly very entertaining and engaging, even if it doesn’t go as in-depth as one would hope.

Compared to the excellent Feels Good Man, The Antisocial Network is incredibly disappointing. Although it’s a well-made, mostly engaging watch, one can’t help but see the potential this had if it had explored its themes with more depth. If anything, it makes you want to seek out more thorough sources.

The Antisocial Network is screening at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival, which runs March 8-16 in Austin, TX.

​Rating: 3/5