Directed by Simon Verhoeven
Written by Matthew Ballen, Phillip Koch, Simon Verhoeven
Starring Alycia Debnam Carey, William Mosely, Connor Paolo, Brit Morgan
Release Date September 22nd, 2017
Published September 23rd, 2017
Friend Request is yet another failed attempt to combine social media and horror. It really shouldn’t be that hard to combine the two when you consider the daily horrors that social media enacts upon us when we simply pick up our phones, but filmmakers have thus far made the combination look impossible. Social media has numerous innate existential horrors that could be exploited by a smart filmmaker, but the question seems to come back to how you can exploit that for a body count and so far, no one has been able to pull that off.
Friend Request stars Alycia Debnam-Carey as Laura, a popular college student with a strong group of close friends. How do we know that Laura is popular? Because we see her Facebook friend number flashed on the screen in scenes where she is not on Facebook. The film very much wants us to know that Laura’s friend count is super important to the plot.
Laura’s life of accepting friend requests from internet strangers is upended when she meets Marina (Liesl Ahlers) an unpopular loner who has no Facebook friends until Laura takes pity on her and accepts her friend request. Marina is of the belief that if you become friends on Facebook then you become friends in real life, but when she is not invited to Laura’s birthday party, her illusions are shattered, and she takes her own life.
Things aren’t over from there, however, as it turns out that Marina was a witch and has used her laptop as a portal into the online world where her magic gives her control over Laura’s Facebook account where she posts a video of her own suicide and causes Laura to lose friends from her friend count. Not kidding, the film pauses to give us a graphic of Laura’s friend count going down.
