#dogpoopgirl

Romanian director Andrei Hutleac's consideration of viral videos and everyone's 15 minutes of fame is so barbed and dark in places the comedy feels fully weaponised as he takes an unfortunate moment and spins it sharply into the arena of modern social networking. Knowing that the film was inspired by a real-life event that saw a woman go viral in Korea back in 2005 only adds to its underpinning of melancholy.

Where many cyberbullying films have tended to focus on teenagers and/or sex-shaming, including Story Of A Girl and Share, Hutleac's film emphasises how a largely insignificant, if unlucky incident, can happen to anybody, whatever their age, spiralling out of control when it hits the Twittersphere and the daily news cycle.

Alina (Andreea Gramosteanu) is a pretty standard type of person. In fact, if anything, she's slightly more caring than the average, given we will learn she was recently her bank's employee of the year and that, when we meet her, she's adopting a dog. She is smitten by little Oscar, who hungrily troughs down the handful of treats the shelter worker gives to her to feed him. A bit too hungrily, as it turns out because, a short while later as they're on the metro back to her home, he throws the lot back up in the middle of a busy carriage. Alina is, not unsurprisingly, caught unprepared, without so much as a tissue to wipe it up and soon finds herself the centre of attention as those around her accuse the dog of putting its business under their noses.

As the situation begins to get heated, someone starts to film on a phone, capturing an exchange between her and an elderly man, who becomes threatening, as, all the while a train security guard feigns disinterest. In the pre-internet age this incident would surely be quickly forgotten, but things enter a whole new realm when the boy who shot the footage uploads part of it to the internet.

Anyone who has spent any length of time on social networks can guess what happens next as, first Alina acquires her own hashtag and then begins to garner the interest of daytime TV. In an indication of the way things can escalate, it's the guard and not Alina, who first comes into the media spotlight, with disastrous consequences, before the keyboard warriors turn their sights on aiming to track her down. Hutleac may be deliberately pushing things to extremes, employing sharp stabs of humour throughout that might prove too much for some audiences, but perhaps the most shocking thing about the events that unfold is that they are never completely implausible.

The writer/director - whose film won the top prize at Moscow International Film Festival - captures the feeding frenzy that the relationship between internet and news can turn into as the story gets batted backward and forward, developing new angles, encouraging viewers to become fully 'invested' in ways that can only spell trouble for all concerned. He even takes a sideswipe at the so-called higher arts along the way, showing that nobody is above a bit of bandwagon jumping when it suits them. Gramosteanu, who also won the acting prize in Moscow, captures the whirlwind of emotions experienced by Alina, from bewilderment to devastation, but it's interesting to note how large chunks of the story move along without her presence - emphasising the way that victims of cyberbullying can, paradoxically, also become almost irrelevant on some level.