You could have written “sorry, watching a movie right now” and then stop responding or reading messages they send you.

Hell, even if you remove the “sorry” part of the message. At a certain point, you need to take accountability for how you write messages, despite being in a bad place mentally at the moment. Maybe they were frustrating you by continuing to message you while you were busy (and it does sound like they had prior knowledge you were busy with a movie), but it also requires that you were continuing to engage with them despite being frustrating. Nothing was preventing you from simply not responding until the movie was over.

Many of us never believed in American Exceptionalism, since we could see this country slipping backwards while the rest of the world continued to progress.