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LEO, BARRY, PAM, and SARA are long-time friends who enjoy spending time with one another.

But Leo wishes they could talk about something for more than five-minutes without someone reaching for their phone

and getting pictures of it, learning how to spell it, researching it, buying tickets for it, or clicking on links somehow related to it.

When he finally brings this up one evening at his house, and suggests that his three friends can’t be device-free for an evening,

Barry takes umbrage and bets him they can.

Leo won’t bet money. But he will bet this: They have to be untethered for rest of the evening. Whoever reaches for their phone loses.

And the loser has to be the winner’s servant for a day.

Out to prove that Leo is dead wrong, Barry agrees to the bet and gets Pam and Sara to join him.

After Leo has them turn off their phones and put them in a basket that he places on a nearby bookcase, they resume their evening.

It goes well enough for a while... Sara even likes being untethered.

Until one of the phones starts signaling an incoming text.

Looks like someone didn’t turn theirs off.

As the phone keeps sounding with text after text, Barry, Pam, and Sara get increasingly uneasy.

Is it, as Leo suggests, merely someone sending pictures of their soufflé, or saying they just arrived at a movie theater

and are eating popcorn while waiting for the film to begin, or sending a selfie they didn’t have to take to begin with?

Or is it, as the three of them fear with greater and great urgency, something Big happening out there? Something Important.

Then they turn on one another, hurling accusations and recriminations about whose fault all this is.

Could it be that Untethered is harder than most of us would like to think?