The best thing that can be said about this lame attempt at satirizing social media culture is that its chosen form, mockumentary, hopelessly tired subgenre though it is, stylistically is probably the most appropriate cinematic form to skewer the snapchat/twitter/vidblog/insta-whatever culture that currently has a hegemonic chokehold over our life and times. So then it would seem that The Social Ones, a mockumentary whose goal, presumably, is to lampoon 21st-century social media culture, would have a golden opportunity to put the new age of online charlatanism in its place—much like Spinal Tap did for bad 1980s hair-metal music.
Unfortunately, The Social Ones suffers from unimaginative student-film-worthy directing and writing. The paper-thin premise centers on the lead-up to fictional publication the National Influencer’s big photoshoot of their celebratory 'five pillars of society' issue: there’s the 'meme god' the 'vlogger' star, the fashion Instagram celeb, a star snapchatter, and a chef who makes 'Instagram-ready' food. All of the characters herein, including the young editors of the National Influencer, are flat, colorless ciphers: and there’s a joy-killing lack of subtlety in the filmmakers’ send-up of internet-ready celebrity. Simply creating a discrepancy between, for example, someone’s sense of exaggerated self-importance and whatever banal online activity they partake in—dressing up dogs for YouTube videos, for example—isn’t enough to get laughs.
Even worse are the painfully unfunny segments featuring interviews with a 'social media' shrink and a social media author who writes about 'hashtag sex' and relationships that are purely virtual. All of the pretend online celebs that get roasted here are predictably horrible people who are, deep down, thoroughly dull and unhappy inside. Of course, any director/writer taking such a holier-than-thou approach to characters in any film—essentially disallowing them any humanity—almost never works.
In exemplary mockumentaries like Waiting for Guffman and The Office there’s a certain deadpan restraint in the humor that takes subtle jabs at identifiable human behavioral quirks; in The Social Ones there’s no viable humanity to poke fun at on display—just uninspired cardboard caricatures. A missed opportunity if there ever was one. Not Recommended.