Catfish (2010)
February 16, 2025 11:05 AM - Subscribe
Nev, a 24-year-old New York-based photographer, has no idea what he's in for when Abby, an eight-year-old girl from rural Michigan, contacts him on Facebook, seeking permission to paint one of his photographs. When he receives her remarkable painting, Nev begins casually corresponding with Abby and Abby's mother Angela, and then begins a virtual romance with Abby's attractive older sister, Megan, a musician and model. But when Nev and his buddies start noticing that some of the things Megan and Angela say don't add up, they embark on a road trip to Michigan in search of the truth.
Background Information
Catfish is a 2010 American documentary film directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. It involves a young man, Nev, being filmed by his brother and friend, co-directors Ariel and Henry, as he builds a romantic relationship with a young woman on the social networking website Facebook. The film was a critical and commercial success. It led to an MTV reality TV series, Catfish: The TV Show. The film is credited with coining the term "catfishing", which is now widely recognized and used to denote a type of deceptive activity involving a person creating a fake social networking presence for nefarious purposes.
Critical Reception
The film was well received by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes it has an approval rating of 80% based on 154 reviews. The site's consensus being "Catfish may tread the line between real-life drama and crass exploitation a little too unsteadily for some viewers' tastes, but its timely premise and tightly wound mystery make for a gripping documentary". On Metacritic the film has a score of 65% based on reviews from 29 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Time magazine did a full-page article, written by Mary Pols in a September 2010 issue, saying "as you watch Catfish, squirming in anticipation of the trouble that must lie ahead―why else would this be a movie?―you're likely to think this is the real face of social networking."
At the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Alison Willmore of IFC described it as a "sad, unusual love story." John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter called Catfish "jaw-dropping" and "crowd-pleasing", but said that it "will require clever marketing in order to preserve the surprises at its core." Kyle Buchanan of Movieline asked if "easily the most buzzed-about documentary" at Sundance had "a truth problem", and reported that an audience member questioned whether it was a documentary at all. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times referred to these questions as a "severe cross-examination" and that filmmakers "protested their innocence, and indeed everyone in the film is exactly as the film portrays them."
Total Film described the film as "funny, unsettling and thoroughly engrossing... the end result is a compulsive, propulsive study of relationships virtual and real".
Trivia
As of August 2011, the film has been hit with two lawsuits and, according to Catfish distributor Relativity Media, the film has an unrecouped balance of more than $8.5 million and will not likely ever become profitable. Both of these lawsuits have to do with songs used within the movie not being attributed to their creators.
As of 2025, the Google Street View image shown in the movie (of the Wesselman house with a child playing in the yard) is still the official image on Street View for that address.
One of Angela's and Megan's "real" friends on Facebook who shared songs and advice turned out to also be a fictional character called Denton Rose who won America's Dream Date as a fictional character in 2006. The character appeared on Fox, and the WSJ and was offered the lead role in a DreamWorks film.
The opening logos are recorded off a computer (specifically a Mac). The Universal logo is shown as someone using Google Earth. The Relativity Media logo is shown as if it was an online video. The Rogue Pictures logo is shown as a desktop icon.
Quotes
Yaniv Schulman: If this is your documentary, you're doing a bad job.
Ariel Schulman: Why?
Yaniv Schulman: Because you're catching me when I don't want to talk about things.
Ariel Schulman: How should we do it?
Yaniv Schulman: Set it up, organize a time with me, put together some materials, emails, we'll get the Facebook conversations printed out and we'll really talk about it.
Vince Pierce: They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They'd keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank God for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn't have somebody nipping at our fin.
Background Information
Catfish is a 2010 American documentary film directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. It involves a young man, Nev, being filmed by his brother and friend, co-directors Ariel and Henry, as he builds a romantic relationship with a young woman on the social networking website Facebook. The film was a critical and commercial success. It led to an MTV reality TV series, Catfish: The TV Show. The film is credited with coining the term "catfishing", which is now widely recognized and used to denote a type of deceptive activity involving a person creating a fake social networking presence for nefarious purposes.
Critical Reception
The film was well received by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes it has an approval rating of 80% based on 154 reviews. The site's consensus being "Catfish may tread the line between real-life drama and crass exploitation a little too unsteadily for some viewers' tastes, but its timely premise and tightly wound mystery make for a gripping documentary". On Metacritic the film has a score of 65% based on reviews from 29 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Time magazine did a full-page article, written by Mary Pols in a September 2010 issue, saying "as you watch Catfish, squirming in anticipation of the trouble that must lie ahead―why else would this be a movie?―you're likely to think this is the real face of social networking."
At the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Alison Willmore of IFC described it as a "sad, unusual love story." John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter called Catfish "jaw-dropping" and "crowd-pleasing", but said that it "will require clever marketing in order to preserve the surprises at its core." Kyle Buchanan of Movieline asked if "easily the most buzzed-about documentary" at Sundance had "a truth problem", and reported that an audience member questioned whether it was a documentary at all. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times referred to these questions as a "severe cross-examination" and that filmmakers "protested their innocence, and indeed everyone in the film is exactly as the film portrays them."
Total Film described the film as "funny, unsettling and thoroughly engrossing... the end result is a compulsive, propulsive study of relationships virtual and real".
Trivia
As of August 2011, the film has been hit with two lawsuits and, according to Catfish distributor Relativity Media, the film has an unrecouped balance of more than $8.5 million and will not likely ever become profitable. Both of these lawsuits have to do with songs used within the movie not being attributed to their creators.
As of 2025, the Google Street View image shown in the movie (of the Wesselman house with a child playing in the yard) is still the official image on Street View for that address.
One of Angela's and Megan's "real" friends on Facebook who shared songs and advice turned out to also be a fictional character called Denton Rose who won America's Dream Date as a fictional character in 2006. The character appeared on Fox, and the WSJ and was offered the lead role in a DreamWorks film.
The opening logos are recorded off a computer (specifically a Mac). The Universal logo is shown as someone using Google Earth. The Relativity Media logo is shown as if it was an online video. The Rogue Pictures logo is shown as a desktop icon.
Quotes
Yaniv Schulman: If this is your documentary, you're doing a bad job.
Ariel Schulman: Why?
Yaniv Schulman: Because you're catching me when I don't want to talk about things.
Ariel Schulman: How should we do it?
Yaniv Schulman: Set it up, organize a time with me, put together some materials, emails, we'll get the Facebook conversations printed out and we'll really talk about it.
Vince Pierce: They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They'd keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank God for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn't have somebody nipping at our fin.
There is widespread skepticism and speculation as to how much of this documentary is real. It does seem improbable that Angela would cooperate with such a production and have her lies and dysfunction exposed in such a way. Also, Nev and his brother were documenting the story from the beginning -- why do that, unless they knew there was a story there, and realized something was up right away? My own theory is that once Nev began to realize that Angela and Megan weren't what they claimed to be, he and his brother then restaged and filmed those earlier moments, but that otherwise the events of this documentary are more or less as portrayed.
I watched this movie because I've recently fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole of media pertaining to relationships with pathological liars, although my interest in such matters isn't new. When The Americans was on, I found the Martha story, which is fictional but based on three documented real life Cold War occurrences of women who had very similar experiences, to be the most compelling thing about an addictive show. After watching Mrs. Wilson in 2019, I became mildly obsessed with it and watched it three or four times. Then last week I read Fake, by Stephanie Wood, and I made a note of three documentaries she references in her book: Catfish, Seduced By Evil, and He Lied About Everything. I haven't seen the last two yet.
What strikes me about Catfish is that Nev came through his experience with Angela relatively unscathed compared to the people involved in other similar stories I mention above, who are often left devastated by such "relationships". This is partly due to the nature of Angela's behaviour towards him. As one of the guys in the documentary said, her behaviour doesn't stem from malice, but is merely sad. She was not at all abusive or exploitative but trying in a very dysfunctional way to live the kind of life and get the kind of emotional gratification she wished she had. For instance, her paintings were naive for a 40-year-old woman, but would be remarkable if done by an eight-year-old girl, so she passed them off as her daughter Abby's artwork.
Nev also acted to protect himself by keeing his feet on the ground. He doesn't seem to have seen what he had with "Megan" as an actual romantic relationship but rather as a potential romantic relationship, which was a healthy, reasonable response to their correspondence, and he kept a certain critical distance from the situation and was savvy enough to do some fact checking rather than simply buying into the things Megan and Angela said. His brother and friend's support would have helped in this regard, because they could be more emotionally objective than him and also saw the situation as a lark... as well as material for an artistic and commercially viable project.
Nev's a model in a way for how to avoid being suckered into a relationship built on lies and betrayal. Keep your brain switched on, don't give your trust too quickly, manage your expectations, don't ignore inconsistencies or other red flags, bail if you see a pattern of lying or other unacceptable behaviour (three or more times is a pattern), and if you have level-headed people who care about you in your life who are alarmed about your situation, listen to them.
posted by orange swan at 11:58 AM on February 17 [7 favorites]
I watched this movie because I've recently fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole of media pertaining to relationships with pathological liars, although my interest in such matters isn't new. When The Americans was on, I found the Martha story, which is fictional but based on three documented real life Cold War occurrences of women who had very similar experiences, to be the most compelling thing about an addictive show. After watching Mrs. Wilson in 2019, I became mildly obsessed with it and watched it three or four times. Then last week I read Fake, by Stephanie Wood, and I made a note of three documentaries she references in her book: Catfish, Seduced By Evil, and He Lied About Everything. I haven't seen the last two yet.
What strikes me about Catfish is that Nev came through his experience with Angela relatively unscathed compared to the people involved in other similar stories I mention above, who are often left devastated by such "relationships". This is partly due to the nature of Angela's behaviour towards him. As one of the guys in the documentary said, her behaviour doesn't stem from malice, but is merely sad. She was not at all abusive or exploitative but trying in a very dysfunctional way to live the kind of life and get the kind of emotional gratification she wished she had. For instance, her paintings were naive for a 40-year-old woman, but would be remarkable if done by an eight-year-old girl, so she passed them off as her daughter Abby's artwork.
Nev also acted to protect himself by keeing his feet on the ground. He doesn't seem to have seen what he had with "Megan" as an actual romantic relationship but rather as a potential romantic relationship, which was a healthy, reasonable response to their correspondence, and he kept a certain critical distance from the situation and was savvy enough to do some fact checking rather than simply buying into the things Megan and Angela said. His brother and friend's support would have helped in this regard, because they could be more emotionally objective than him and also saw the situation as a lark... as well as material for an artistic and commercially viable project.
Nev's a model in a way for how to avoid being suckered into a relationship built on lies and betrayal. Keep your brain switched on, don't give your trust too quickly, manage your expectations, don't ignore inconsistencies or other red flags, bail if you see a pattern of lying or other unacceptable behaviour (three or more times is a pattern), and if you have level-headed people who care about you in your life who are alarmed about your situation, listen to them.
posted by orange swan at 11:58 AM on February 17 [7 favorites]
So much of the film felt phony to me. For one thing, the filmmaker decided to appear in his own film shirtless a distracting number of times. I know there's nothing inherently wrong with someone not wearing a shirt. But making a documentary in 2010 and repeatedly putting yourself on camera, talking to camera... without a shirt... just felt extremely performative and calculated.
Performative. That's how I'd describe this entire so-called documentary. It felt phony as a three dollar bill and I strongly disliked it.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:12 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]
Performative. That's how I'd describe this entire so-called documentary. It felt phony as a three dollar bill and I strongly disliked it.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:12 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]
I watched this with a friend accidentally as we were looking for a scary movie and the trailer was so creepy (starting about 1:40 in this trailer) So the entire time of the film we were waiting for the weird scary shit to start but it never really did. Kind of a weird way to experience this one.
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:03 AM on February 19
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:03 AM on February 19
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I do think Nev has some absolute honesty here that cannot be faked. There's a vulnerability here that just seems real to me.
But I think once they decided they had some kind of story, they manipulated the timeline. Look, all documentaries are looking to tell a story. I think we have this idea that docs somehow just document the absolute truth, but no, they're looking for a narrative.
I think this doc wanted a specific narrative and eventually decided to shape it into the one they wanted. Does that make it not true? No, not necessarily.
I think this all mostly happened but the filmmakers found a good way to package it into a good story. I'm OK with that. Documentaries are movies and they need a beginning, a middle and an end, after all, like all narratives do. Also, I think the Catfish possibly being a catfish is fun meta thing.
(The Catfish TV show is such a guilty pleasure. Nev is ... Nev, and I do really like Kamie -- although I did really like Max -- but I also think Nev has a certain amount of empathy that can't be faked, even with reality show cameras.)
posted by edencosmic at 5:43 PM on February 16