'Friend Request' Review: Facebook is evil. 'Nuff said.

 

Well it was bound to happen. It's invaded pretty much everything else that we know and love, so it was only a matter of time before Facebook infiltrated the world of horror movies too, and so we get Simon Verhoeven's Friend Request. Whilst never named explicitly (I guess being associated with demonic murder is bad for business), the social network is the framework upon which the story of a group of college students terrorised by a malevolent online entity is told. It's nothing particularly new, it's been done before (and done better) but it's not necessarily all bad.

 

Not all bad sure, but definitely not great either. The plot revolves around popular college student Laura who, after accepting an online friend request from awkward lonely girl Marina, only to later reject her intense insistence on friendship in person, unwittingly plunges her group of friends into a nightmare as Marina (having committed suicide after Laura's rejection) proceeds to harass and haunt the group from beyond the grave via their laptops and smartphones, compelling them to kill themselves in turn in increasingly gruesome ways. Still following? Good.  

 

The concept is pretty fun and had a lot of potential, but the film has a number of flaws. Perhaps greatest amongst these is its characters. Laura and her friends are the kind of characters that I think I was supposed to relate to, but whom in reality are the kind of people whom I simply cannot stand. They're the kind of people who can't spend five minutes without checking their phone or logging into Facebook just in case someone has posted a 'hilarious' video clip or 'super-important' status update. They're the kind of people who post pictures of themselves on nights out (or doing any other activity for that matter) with captions like 'last night was SUCH a shambles' or 'I got so drunk I still can't feel my legs lol!' as if getting drunk and dancing is some sort of achievement, or post selfies with self-deprecating comments designed to garner compliments. They're the kind of people whose friends start dying around them and yet still have the time and inclination to have perfectly painted toe-nails!

 

'OMG, my hair is like SUCH a state! lol'

 

Yes, this is where the film fails the most. There's just no-one in it that I actually care about. In fact from the early montage of the friend group partying, laughing and generally being far too happy and perfect, I actively disliked them. Alycia Debnam-Carey (imagine a doe-eyed cross between Taissa Farmiga and Elizabeth Olsen) puts in an admirable attempt as quasi-final girl Laura, but there's just not enough of a character there to set her apart from Stock College Girl Character #2.

 

In fact perhaps the most relatable character (although perhaps this says more about me than the film itself!) is Marina, the (admittedly pretty whacko!) outsider who after being rejected by Laura and her perfect friends, proceeds to enact her revenge by offing them one by one with the intention of making Laura as lonely as she herself was in life. Sure, an extreme reaction, but she only wanted to be friends and it's easy to see how the constant deluge of photos and statuses depicting the relationships of a group of people she couldn't be part of could lead her to lashing out. It's almost hard not to sympathise with her. Just me...? Moving on!

 

Despite it's lack of any compelling characters, the film trundles along at a relatively engaging pace whilst providing a few admittedly creepy moments, never resting long enough for boredom to set in. However, there's just a sense throughout that it's trying too hard. With the film's main premise hanging on the fact that Laura is so popular and active on social media, as things get more and more sinister and Laura becomes publicly associated with the horrific events unfolding (Marina posts videos of each suicide on Laura's profile, posing as her), the film marks this downward spiral with an on-screen friend counter as people unfriend Laura and her popularity online decreases. It even takes a good few of her friends to be bumped off in horrific fashion before she even considers committing the unthinkable act of...deleting her profile! Yes really, the true horror in this film is the idea of people unfriending you on Facebook! The terror of it! Screaming Emoji!

 

Laura, you're friends are dying. Laura! Friends...dead...? Laura...? *facepalm*

This emphasis on the importance of online popularity and the characters' obsession with social media (Laura even studies Internet Addiction at college...yeah...) should allow for an interesting statement or cautionary tale, however it really just comes across as a wasted opportunity and the moments where it is treated as such are presented with such a lack of subtlety that the only cautionary tale I could glean was that rolling your eyes too much in quick succession leads to a headache! Connor Paolo's Kobe is a prime example of this as Laura's super-hacker friend (everyone has one of those, right?), whose main skill actually appears to be super-Googling, enabling him to solve the mystery of Marina's past with only a few quick clicks and key-strokes, reiterating the film's message that the internet can solve everything! No wait...

 

Despite how it may sound, this really isn't a bad little film overall. It has an interesting premise (at least initially), some genuinely unsettling imagery (the animated segments portraying Marina's homemade films are both beautiful and nightmare-inducing) and generally the actors make the most of what little they're given to work with. However, what starts out as a relatively fresh take on the techno-horror genre, soon devolves into the same old 'malevolent entity terrorises rich, attractive white people' shtick that we've seen time and time again, just with an extra dash of FaceTiming and txt spk. A lack of depth and a reliance on cliché lead to an uneven film, which despite all of its desperate efforts to make us relate to and like its characters, just leaves us feeling all the more disconnected, ironically emulating the experience of Facebook and social media down to a tee. Hmm, maybe this film is more clever than it seems...

 

DISCLAIMER: It's worth noting that Friend Request is actually a sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really remake of the (much superior) 2014 movie Unfriended. The original film is much more, well, original, presented entirely via the lead character's laptop screen in a clever twist on the found-footage genre, with developments occurring via Skype calls, Facebook chats and Google searches. If you find yourself with the choice, I'd definitely recommend Unfriended over Friend Request, but if you're morbidly curious the two films are different enough in plot and execution that you won't find yourself with remake-fatigue if you do decide to watch them both.