The most important lesson gleaned from Friend
Request: Beware the Facebook witches, because they are a real thing
and they’re coming for you and your friends! Apparently. And while I won’t go
so far as to heap praise on German director Simon Verhoeven’s 2016 (it took a
while to make it to U.S. shores) horror film for being particularly original,
or even all that memorable, it’s solid genre fun. At times. In fact, it has the
makings of an awesome junior high sleepover movie.
Laura (Alycia Debnam-Carey, The 100,
Fear the Walking Dead) has the perfect life. She’s pretty, she’s
smart, she’s one of the most popular girls at her college, and
she has a hunky boyfriend. Everything’s all sunshine and puppy dogs. Until she
accepts a friend request from Marina (Liesl Ahlers), the overenthusiastic goth
girl with zero friends who sits in the back of their psych class and eats her
own hair. Infatuation blooms into fixation, and before long, Laura finds
herself dealing with an evil presence that kills off her besties one by one.
And ruins her social standing on campus! That may be the biggest blow.
Taken as a whole, Friend Request plays
out like J-horror-lite, a kind of mixture of Candyman and
The Ring. Most of the jump scares are predictable and easily
spotted. None of the characters offer much of interest. Attempts to make a
grander point about online oversharing, isolation, and social media obsession
fall flat. (A running on-screen friend tally proves a clunky, intrusive device
that provides more unintentional laughs than substance.) And eventually it spins
its wheels as the plot repeats the same beat over and over. If you’re looking
for something you’ve never seen, look elsewhere.
While the whole paints a lackluster picture, individual
pieces are remarkably effective. Much of the imagery is familiar, especially to
horror fans. But it also occasionally provides legitimate shocks, gruesome
moments that will sate the gore hounds, and eerie, foreboding animations
courtesy of Marina that manage to be both unnerving and lovely. And for every
ham-fisted, obvious jump scare, there’s one that lands—Verhoeven and company
hit at least as often as they miss, including one that, hand to god, gave me
goose bumps.
The plot takes an especially dark turn when it digs into
Marina’s past. But like the rest of the movie, while it provides creepy, skin-crawling
flourishes, others wind up so overwrought they’re comical.
I’ll give Friend Request points for attempting
to put a modern millennial spin on an age-old black-mirror magic tale, subbing
in computer monitors and iPhone screens for the more arcane tools of the witchcraft
trade. And the ubiquitous nature of technology adds an edge—evil can strike
anywhere, any time, and everyone essentially carries their own doom in their
pockets. Again, it doesn’t always click, but it has moments.
While entirely unremarkable, the assembled cast of
cookie-cutter students does what they’re intended to do. Debnam-Carey plays the
perfect girl who has a sassy blond friend (Brit Morgan) and a spunky chubby
friend (Brooke Markham). Their crew also includes a beefcake med school student
(William Moseley), a wacky chubby dude (Sean Marquette), and a twitchy,
blood-shot-eyed exposition machine who’s “secretly” in love with Laura (Connor
Paolo). They all have three notes: BFFs, frazzled from being hunted by evil
spirits on Facebook, and dead or about to be dead. This collection of types
represents the new-jack spin on the Scream/I Know
What You Did Last Summer knock-off roster of yesteryear and serves the
same functional, if uninspired purpose.
And that’s really what can be said about Friend
Request, functional, if uninspired. It delivers exactly what it
promises: quick, cheap horror movie thrills. To be honest, it’s not even the
most effective social-media-gone-wrong cautionary tale this year (look to
Ingrid Goes West for that honor). While hardcore genre
fanatics won’t find anything surprising, it’s a pleasing enough horror excursion
and you can do much worse. Watch with the lights out on a rainy fall night,
prepare for a gaggle of nervous giggles mixed with incredulous laughter, and it
does the trick. [Grade: B-/C+]
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