Friend Request Film

[Adabella Frierdich]

LauraWoodson is a popular campus student with over 800 friends on Facebook. She lives with Olivia Mathison, Isabelle, and Gustavo Garcia, Isabelle's boyfriend. She is close friends with Kobe and is dating Tyler McCormick.

Laura receives a friend request from her classmate Marina Mills. Noticing she has no friends, she accepts and the two begin a relationship as friends, but she is uncomfortable with Marina's obsessive behavior and sees that her Facebook profile is full of negative posts. Marina wants to attend Laura's birthday dinner but Laura lies and says only she and Tyler are going out. That night, Marina sees pictures of Laura and her friends on Facebook, and angrily confronts her the next day. During their quarrel, Laura accidentally reveals Marina's bald spot, a result of hair pulling disorder. She then unfriends Marina on Facebook.

The next morning, it is announced that Marina committed suicide. Laura feels responsible but tries to forget about it until Marina uploads a video showing her burning a sketch of Laura before hanging herself. The video is somehow posted on Laura's own page and she is unable to remove it or delete her account. Marina adds Gustavo as a friend. He is then terrorized by a demonic spirit and has his face smashed by an invisible entity. Isabelle discovers him and is sent to the hospital. A video of Gustavo's apparent suicide is posted on Laura's page, damaging her reputation even further.

Laura and Kobe break into Marina's dorm room and find an old class photograph from an orphanage. Laura visits the orphanage and discovers Marina's real last name is Nedifar, and she was tormented by two boys when she was younger. The boys were murdered, with their faces mutilated and swarmed by black wasps, the same way Gustavo died. Her mother had been part of a commune, rumored to be a demonic cult, until someone set it on fire. Her mother, then pregnant, was horribly burned and rendered brain dead, so doctors performed a C-section to deliver Marina. Kobe does research on black mirrors, which they keep seeing, and learns that they were mostly used by witches.

Isabelle becomes Marina's next victim. A video of her killing herself is posted on Laura's page. Olivia is attacked and, after being possessed, killed herself. Laura and Kobe go in search of the place where Marina committed suicide to destroy the black mirror she died in front of, as that is what she used to become an evil spirit to torment Laura. Kobe, realizing he is the next victim, becomes deranged, and stabs Laura, hoping to kill her and save himself.

She escapes and learns that Marina killed herself in a nearby factory. Tyler finds Laura, but Kobe kills him. After Laura reaches a dead end, Kobe gets killed by the swarm of wasps. Laura finally finds Marina's burned corpse and, after staring at her laptop, a demonic Marina lunges at her.

The film was shot in Cape Town at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Though the film was produced by German director Simon Verhoeven and German production companies, the largely English-speaking cast required the film to be shot in English. Filming ended in March 2014.[5]

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 17% based on 77 reviews, with an average rating of 3.6/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Friend Request's attempts to update old-school teen horror for the digital age do not, sadly, include memorable characters, fresh scares, or novel storytelling twists."[9] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 31 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[10] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.[8]

Ally Wybrew of Empire gave the film 3 out of 5 stars, praising Debnam-Carey, who "[stood] out [amongst] otherwise mediocre performances" in contrast to the poorly written character of Marina. Wybrew went on to criticise the clunky lines, overenthusiastic score, and the protracted final act.[15] The Observer's Mark Kermode also gave it 3/5 stars, writing, "Despite an overreliance on loud bangs, director Simon Verhoeven pulls off a couple of chills, even as dialogue such as: 'Unfriend that dead bitch!' keep things snarky rather than scary."[16]

Friend Request is the second "Facebook horror film" to receive wide release in the past two years. That number may either seem too high or too low to you, but it's certainly fertile pop-culture territory: young, hip kids live their lives online and die for it, mwahaha.

This week's new film (which, technically, came out in Germany in 2016) isn't shy about aping the 2015 film Unfriended, and it liberally borrows from the likes of Black Mirror, as well. In good news, this unoriginal horror movie plays smart, funny, and breezy with its material, which is mostly the point of a good slasher flick anyway. It's certainly not the ultimate "evils of Facebook" film, in terms of either social commentary or pointed, Facebook-related barbs, and its weak ending tanks some of the fun. But there's still enough solid stuff here to make this a pleasant, beginning-of-autumn horror surprise.

Her life collides with Marina Mills, conveniently enough, at a college psychology course during a lecture about Internet Addiction Disorder. A professor reminds the class that this disorder is "an escape from things we don't want to deal with," and, of course, the students don't notice; they're too busy checking their phones and laptops. Friend Request wastes no time outing Marina as a terrifying, made-of-red-flags goth kid, as every early shot of her comes complete with eerie stares and creepy sound cues, and it's during this lecture that Marina's across-the-room stares turn into a more overt act: she sends the cute, popular Laura a friend request.

"This girl has zero friends?" Laura's friend shouts with a laugh later on while flipping through Marina's bizarre profile. "What is she, 12 years old?" But Laura takes pity on the weirdo, whose social media page is covered with intricate, hand-drawn artwork, and clicks "accept." Things, unsurprisingly, get weird from there. When Laura complains about her busy life, Marina excitedly and wickedly whispers in response, "too many friends!" People start having eerie dreams. Marina begins obsessively e-stalking Laura. And when tragedy befalls the new kid, Laura quickly realizes that she's trapped: bad stuff is going to happen to everyone she cares about, especially if they're connected via social media.

Unfriended has a similar premise: a teenager dies, then she mysteriously takes her vengeance out on a group of friends in a way that connects them all via various chat and networking platforms. But Unfriended lives and dies much more by the sword of its gimmick, which has the entire film take place on the protagonist's computer screen (with friends' faces and events appearing primarily via video-chat windows). Friend Request may not be as clever, but it's infinitely more watchable and actually flexes some really solid set-design chops. It doesn't look like a cost-cutting horror flick; rather, its creepiest moments take place in a large variety of locations, and that's key for a fun horror film.

"Fakebook" integration happens all of the time in Friend Request, of course, with the good times (emojis and selfies) and the bad times (dropping friend counts, "delete your account" demands) all being shown on screen via familiar UI. But thanks to how the plot unfolds, the social-media aspects ultimately become window dressing for a more traditional horror film story that combines the occult with a shunned outcast.

Friend Request leans more on tension and creepiness than jump scares, and its likable characters and striking artistic and set design go a long way toward making you teeter toward the edge of your seat during these moments. This isn't as remarkable as, say, It Follows, but it's also a far more interesting and entertaining horror film than the new It.

The film's producers have definitely done their tech-based homework in some ways, and the token super-geek character Kobe is always accompanied by accurate screens of things like code and searches through the Web's darker corners. (One blink-and-you'll-miss-it appropriation of 4chan imageboard content is quite good.) But one crucial point of the film's logic is totally busted: Laura and her friends see certain, awful content automatically appear on their social media pages, but neither police intervention nor phone calls to the social networking site will let Laura delete her page as it starts becoming otherworldly.

In addition to seriously violating American law (imagine if Facebook never let you delete an account), this angle of the film also isn't explored in an interesting way. Friend Request could have satirized the modern "fake news" explosion by having people believe soundly untrue stuff spewing out of Laura's overtaken profile. Or Laura could have tried, and failed, to mount a real-life campaign of battling disinformation, only to find that people were more interested in what social media said on their screens than what she said in real life. Instead, Friend Request pretty quickly gives up on making interesting tech-related statements or jokes. The movie resorts to witchcraft and dark rituals, not computer-related satire.

This shift is still enjoyable and watchable, thanks to a solid cast and serviceable teen-humor script. (Remarkably for Western cinema, the cast is mostly female in a way that feels organic and unforced.) The script's primary exception comes when one character's motivations take a bizarre turn near the film's end. This attempt at a surprise-twist ending fails because its logic runs counter to the rest of the film.

When films use a facsimile of a computer screen in a 1:1 ratio with the frame of the film, a fascinating new territory of film language opens up (for more on this nonsense, here is a previous essay on the form). Web browser tabs are used for character backstory as can desktop wallpapers and folder/document names. Watching someone type and rewrite IMs or emails can be just as telling as when voice is used. There's potential here within what is arguably the most ubiquitous POV of today. Friend Request, the latest cyber-themed horror film, does not surpass the high bar set by the likes of Unfriended, it barely takes place on the place computer screen, but it does bring up interesting questions of the versatility of such a formal choice and features one of the more interesting metaphors for how we use our devices.

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