Respond to these rapid questions in our Friend Request quiz and we will tell you which Friend Request character you are. Play it now.
For the most part, “Friend Request” is up front and honest about its intentions and methods almost from the beginning. Laura (Alycia Debnam-Carey), a generic college student, is watching a cat video on the feed of her non-specific social networking profile (which looks exactly like Facebook, but without the logo and with some of the nomenclature changed—for example, “thumbs up” instead of “like” and “spread” instead of “share”—when the movie begins. It happens when she is least expecting it: a monstrous cat with sharp, pointy teeth and a roar appears in front of her. That’s right, this is going to be another one of those terrifying horror films.
The film does not disappoint, although one would have to lower the bar of expectations in order to say that in a way that is meaningful to the audience at large. The film’s director, Simon Verhoeven, provides us with a number of jump scares, such as when an arm violently enters the frame or when a face is suddenly shown in complete close-up on the screen. Given that this is exactly what the film promises from the outset, I believe that at the very least a few points should be awarded for truth in advertising.
By this point, you’ve probably figured out the routine: The plot revolves around a mystery, in which the characters (those who haven’t been killed off, of course) must figure out why their friends are dying one by one one by one. During this time, they are being picked off by some evil force using supernatural means. It makes no difference what happens in the story. For the film to be considered, it is only necessary that the screenplay (written by Matthew Ballen, Philip Koch, and Verhoeven) take a slightly different approach than the rest of the movie’s game, if only to distract from how familiar the rest of the movie’s game appears to be.
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There is a supernatural element to this story, as it centers on the spirit of a college girl named Marina (Liesl Ahlers), who committed suicide after Laura unfriended her on a website that was supposed to be safe from claims of copyright infringement. Fortunately for Laura, we learn from a lengthy, sort-of flashback that Marina was a cyberstalker who commented on every one of her posts, repeatedly requested video chats, and eventually began following her around in real life. The fact that Marina’s own social networking profile was filled with clues to her own unstable personality, such as unsettling photos of mangled faces and a video of someone stomping on a doll’s head, works against Laura. Laura might have figured it out if she had scrolled down to the bottom of the page and clicked on the “See older posts” link.
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The movie’s deaths are centered on suicide or, better yet, demonic possessions that make the deaths appear to be suicide, which is uncomfortable given that it’s just a gimmicky hook. Laura’s Facebook page is taken over by the ghost in the machine, who posts videos of her friends committing suicide in gruesome ways, beginning with Marina, who hangs herself over a roaring fire in the middle of the night.
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The videos are viewed by Laura’s online friends, all of whom the evil spirit has identified in the posts, and as a result, they begin to unfriend Laura. Perhaps unintentionally, the fact that she still has hundreds of friends after posting two similar videos to her page is interpreted as a form of social commentary. The most recent count we see her with is around 80 friends, and this is after three suicide videos have appeared on her Facebook page in the last week. Thus, a few hundred people believed that posting two suicide videos was a reasonable course of action for someone. Their limit, it appears, was a third video depicting someone’s bloody death, according to the report.
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Laura and her friends—including her boyfriend Tyler (William Moseley), her jealous ex-boyfriend Kobe (Connor Paolo), and her best friend Olivia (Brit Morgan)—investigate Marina’s past in order to figure out what is going on. Every aspect of the film’s mythology is revealed in a flashback sequence that includes a coven of witches, a devastating fire, a boarding school, and a couple of child murders. The fact that none of it matters is that the movie’s sole purpose is to place each of the characters alone in a dark space, toss some eerie sights and sounds their way, and to top it all off, to have something pop up on the screen, accompanied by loud growls and screams.
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The film contains moments of inspiration, such as repeated references to internet addiction (without any legitimate point, other than the fact that it will literally kill you), an unsettling and dynamic shot of rows of computer monitors illuminating a dark room with images of the face and eye of a spirit, and, most notably, a series of animations that tell the story of Marina’s lonely, unfortunate past without the use of witchy hokum. These aren’t much, but when you’re dealing with something as stale and formulaic as “Friend Request,” you have to make do with whatever you can get your hands on to survive.
For more personality quizzes check this: A United Kingdom Quiz.
