Catfish

Catfish (2010) is an American documentary you can watch online on iFILM. New York photographer Nev strikes up a Facebook friendship with Abby, an eight-year-old painter from rural Michigan, then with her whole family, and eventually falls into an online romance with her older sister Megan, a woman he has only ever seen in photos.

For months the relationship lives entirely in messages, phone calls and songs sent across the internet. Then small contradictions in Megan's stories start piling up, and Nev, filmed by his brother and a friend, decides to drive halfway across the country to Michigan and meet her without warning. What waits at the end of that road is best discovered unspoiled.

Directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, with one director's own brother as the subject, this is the film that handed the internet the word catfish, someone hiding behind a fake online identity, and later spun off into a long-running MTV series. It lands because the self-deception on screen feels so ordinary and recognizable. Stream Catfish (2010) online on iFILM.