Starring Alyson Walker. Rated 14A

Most of the fun here can be found in the title of Selfie From Hell, which promises a lot more than the 70-minute thriller can provide.

The cheaply, if efficiently, shot scare flick wastes no time introducing its main premise, which is, as someone bluntly says, “Selfies can kill you.” You might expect such a zeitgeisty assertion to be backed up by at least a few gestures in the philosophical direction of where our current tech obsessions come from. Are we stealing our own souls these days? Is this digital narcissism just another futile attempt at immortality? And who’s that dude who keeps bombing my photos?

In this case, some shadowy figure really does show up in the selfies of one Julia Lang, a vlogger from Berlin, or somewhere. Actor Meelah Adams, seemingly dubbed, is from Germany, as is writer-director Erdal Ceylan, here expanding a mini-short from 2015. Julia runs a site the Vancouver-made movie’s named after. But it’s unclear how this pays for itself, how much material can fill her pages, or why she is visiting her stateside cousin, Hannah (Alyson Walker). The latter also works with computers, sort of. How she pays for the upkeep of her mansionlike abode (actually the majestic Mercer house in New Westminster) is yet another mystery that remains more haunting than anything else that happens on-screen.

No sooner does Julia arrive than she takes one autoportrait too many and falls into an immediate coma. She stays there for the rest of the story, thus saving on dubbing and script-paper costs, with Hannah occasionally wandering into the spare room to ask “U up?” I’d probably call an ambulance, or Ghostbusters even, but Hannah eventually gets too distracted to bother. The film’s creepiest aspect is that she gets odd texts from the conked-out Julia. This prompts her to seek assistance from her tech pal Trevor (Tony Giroux), whom she has never thought of “that way”. Things change when he helps her explore the dark web. This in turn leads them to a physical space, where the spookiest stuff happens. At its most creative, Selfie hints at grisly abstractions recalling David Lynch and Under the Skin. But everything is so rushed, eros-free, and sketchy, the filmmakers must rely on booming sound effects and tired found-footage tropes to sell a story that, scarily enough, didn’t quite make it out of screenwriting purgatory.