Hakle Fanu

A drama revolving around themes common to growing-up teenagers: love, hate, drama, betrayal, and of course the involvement of social media and the immediate subsequences. Meanwhile, the app, called Girigo and initially only created for a school project, grants everyone a wish, but demands the users life within 24 hours. It captures the ambigious effect of the phone and its app's integrated into it. These serve as a quick satisfaction for its user but fades as quickly within its transcience existence as an entertaining reality. Consequently, the app articulates a warning message: to not indulge in short-term pleasure and hasty decisions. As such, the drama gets it quite right and loads the phone with the proper signifiers: realities shifted into social media, exposure through phones, swift fullfilment aided by apps. However, these seemingly positive aspects share the common consequences which engender hatred, violence and mobbing.

From a narrative perspective, the app and the message it conveys are therefore entirely compelling. However, one key aspect that the drama simply overlooks is the world-building. The world feels cut off, and all the actions feel isolated. Generally speaking, the events seem to lack consistency and appropriate detail: were the school or the girls from the past not investigated, and has everything remained untouched between their suicide and the moment when the teenagers from the present solve the mystery? A huge leap on the part of the creators, in which the police, parents, school staff and people in general do not seem to act in accordance with the events happening around them and affecting them. Only the main characters take action, whilst the rest continue as if nothing has happened