Review: Friend Request (2017)

Friend Request (2017)

Rated R for horror violence, disturbing images, and language

Score: 2 out of 5

Remember that movie Unfriended from a couple of years back? From the marketing, the premise, and the very title, Unfriended looked like it would be an absolute disaster, a mess of desperate teen pandering from Hollywood trying to cash in on the fascination with social media among the "kids these days". Instead, it turned out to be surprisingly biting in its portrait of teen culture in the internet age, while also boasting a reliance on building dread over jump scares, an interesting twist on the timeworn "found footage" gimmick that it fully commits to, and a highly creative and entertaining villain in the form of Laura Barns, the online troll from hell. It was a very polarizing movie among horror fans, but to this day, it has its defenders, myself included. Even with a substandard final shot that felt like a cheat, it was proof that you could make a good movie out of even the dumbest-sounding premise.

I'm bringing up Unfriended because today's subject, Friend Request, is pretty much exactly the movie I went into Unfriended expecting to see. While it raises some interesting ideas in its first act as it introduces us to our villain, once the plot is kicked off in earnest it descends into a predictable mess of cheap frights, stupid characters, and laughable ideas about how modern technology works. It's only that promising first act and some solid production values that keep this film above water. If you hated Unfriended, then you're gonna hate this even more, and if you liked that film, you're gonna dislike this mediocre ripoff.

Our protagonist is Laura Goodson (there's that name again; see above re: ripoff), a student at a California college with a very active social life, both online and off. One day, she meets Marina Mills, an outcast classmate with zero friends on Facebook, at least until Laura makes the mistake of adding to her friend list a young woman who turns out to be a crazy stalker. After Laura responds appropriately to Marina's behavior, Marina kills herself and uploads the video to the university website. As you can guess by the fact that this is a horror movie, that's not the end of it by a long shot, as Marina somehow worms her way back into Laura's friend list and starts murdering the people around her, all while uploading videos of the kills to her Facebook page (starting with her own suicide) in order to make Laura look like an insensitive asshole and turn her into a social pariah.

You know, if you're gonna make a movie that's packed with jump scares, you should really think before you put in a scene early in the film in which Laura gets pranked by a screamer video and proceeds to make fun of cheap scare tactics like that. One scene early on, involving a dream about a mirror, does a good job building suspense, and the short animated clips that we see of Marina's work look suitably creepy in a Tim Burton sort of way, but by the end of the first act, we've seen the last effective scare sequence in this that didn't just rely on loud noises to force a physical reaction. Once you've got this film's game figured out, it becomes all too predictable in its beats. The payoffs for Marina's kills aren't terribly effective, either, despite the R rating; half of them are offscreen, only being showed to us later in the form of the videos (and in one case, not even then). Then again, even if this film had gone all-out with the kills, it would barely have mattered without interesting characters to care about. Alycia Debnam-Carey (of The 100 and Fear the Walking Dead fame) keeps the film watchable with a good performance as the heroine, but she can't hold up the film alone despite her best efforts, with most of the people around her leaving little impression. Given that their characters engage in all the dumb behavior you'd expect to learn about in No-Nos of Horror Screenwriting 101, I honestly can't blame them for not trying. One character straight-up turns evil and tries to kill Laura, thinking that doing so will stop Marina's ghost from killing the people around her, without any indication that he was anything less than an upstanding good-guy before then.

The actual story here is a mess. Marina is apparently a witch of some kind with a tragic backstory involving a religious cult and an orphanage, but despite the amount of time the film spends on this subject, it never amounts to much except to rob the villain of whatever mystique she might have. Why rest on a pair of trite, overused horror movie cliches? Likewise, the portrayal of the internet is the latest in a long tradition of movies and TV shows that get it utterly wrong. Unfriended worked partly because it was dead-on accurate in its portrayal of the real-life social media it was built around, at least as it existed in 2014-15. The destruction of Laura's life in this film, meanwhile, is reflected by depicting her friend counter on Facebook literally dropping down to virtually nothing as people unfriend her, in scenes that are just as unintentionally hilarious as they sound. We are told that the updates that Marina is posting to Laura's account are not coming from any IP address (if you wanted it to at least be realistic, have them all come from random addresses all over the globe), while the code for Marina's account is written in some strange language and constantly rewriting itself. Let me put it this way: if your horror movie about social media is gonna have the villain engaging in a "black mirror" ritual as part of her revenge plan, you deserve all of the ribbing you're going to get for daring to invite comparisons to an actually effective satire of the internet.

The Bottom Line

Basic competence at filmmaking and the fact that I didn't leave the theater with steam coming out of my ears are the only things stopping this from getting a 1 out of 5, as there's nothing in it that other films haven't done better. It squanders the promise it shows and rests on endless cliches, and overall feels like a cynical cash-grab from gullible audiences (one that, going by the box-office receipts, nobody fell for).