Friend Request(2016) | A schlocky slasher in the Internet Age

"You seem to know a lot of dead people Miss Laura" - Det. Cameron

Friend Request is a English language horror film directed by Simon Verhoeven and written by Matthew Ballen, Philip Koch, and Simon Verhoeven. It was produced by German Wiedermann & Berg and SevenPictures Film and by South African Two Oceans Productions. It was distributed by Warner Bros in Germany and by Entertainment Studios in the States and is available on Netflix. It stars the acting talents of Alycia Debnam-Carey(Laura Woodson), Liesl Ahlers(Marina Mills), and Connor Paolo(Kobe). For a full list of Cast and Crew.

Friend Request can be called politely as the spiritual successor of 2014's Unfriended.  Laura Woodson is your modern popular girl going to parties, posting selfies, and having a bajillion friends on Legally distinct from Facebook. She befriends the weird goth girl who starts to get lets say overly attached. Marina takes her life several weeks later after Laura unfriends her which starts the beginning of strange horrific suicides each beginning with Marina's Account sending a friend request.


FR plot is a strange combination between it predecessor Unfriended(2014) and The Ring(2002) with Marina seeking out and murdering her friends thru possession and Laura printing out the facebook wall of crazy trying to find the mcguffin, in this case a 'black mirror'. Marinas MO is almost a carbon copy of Laura Barns but far less effective. Where in UF the errors and glitches seem intentional, malicious, and taunting, FR 'unknown error' seems like a cheap plot explanations for why Laura totally can't delete her Facebook page even though her ghost friend keeps tagging her in snuff films in their facebook memories.

Friend Request has two main issues when it comes to writing their lack of sublity and subtext and very little cohesion of story elements. Where Unfriended was a commentary on Cyber bullying and the ghost was killing people responsible for posting a harassment video, Marina simply kills Laura's friends because she wants her to know what it's like to be "alone". The film casually mentions the concept of Internet Addiction but does nothing with this idea. Marina also has a bevy of fun horror tropes to haphazardly throw at her victims with some of the death sequences seemingly constructed by someone who watched 5 minutes of PT and couldn't grasp the concept of subtle storytelling. There are simple slashers (LeatherFace(TCM), Ghostface(Scream)) and their are complex ones (Death(Final Destination), Jigsaw(Saw)) and each benefit from consistent story writing and characterization. Marina is an absurd Mary Sue whose powers make little sense and are very rarely explained. The ending of the film was terrible destroying the small amount of tension that was built with genre blindness, unnecessary deaths, and a confusing and unsatisfying bookend ending that doesn't even follow the motivations of the slasher or the plot. The movies plot is a dumpster fire whose only redeeming quality is that its followable.

While FR has a decent soundtrack. (Gary Go's The Beginning is a lovely piece), its scoring suffers from the same issues that plague the rest of the film. I like to think of incidental scoring as a second layer to the horror or tension of the piece as traditional scoring is meant to relay the emotional context of the scene. Most horror movies rely strongly on ambient music to help provide a sense of unease or loud stings as a way to punctuate a scene. There is however the use of scoring as a way of jump scares which unfortunately is the majority of the sound design in the film. rather then the scoring help show the true terror of facebook friends it rather tries to carry the horror of the film by being "super scary" for about five seconds until another cheap jumpscare.

Friend Request can simply be listed as a disappointment that attempts to throw every horror trope at the wall and see what sticks. It takes a interesting premise and tells a story poorly without depth, foresight or subtlety. Its fails both as a slasher film and as cautionary tale and I think its safe to say that its time to unfriend.