Friend Request (2016)

I never wrote a review for Friend Request when it released in Europe in 2016, mostly because it was one of the most thoroughly underwhelming, by-the-numbers, ill-produced pieces of horror garbage I'd watched in a while. It wasn't the kind of bad that was fun to write about: it was just an indistinct blob of horror on a screen. 

Pre-Halloween seems to be the prime time for those indistinct blobs of horror that the film industry has been saving away. Got a movie saved up that wrapped filming in 2014 and released in Europe in 2016 but hasn't technically had its money-making potential squeezed out of it? Go for it. The US release reminded me that I should probably get some thoughts written down, however brief and aggravated.

I can't tell you much about the plot of Friend Request because I remember watching it and having all of the details dissolve from my mind almost immediately. It's a fitting review to follow the conceptually bloated and allegorically confused mother!, because rather than trying to run three thousand things at once and missing the mark for me, it's missing the mark at a pretty simple single story. Laura (Alycia Debnam-Carey) is a college student living her best life and accepts a friend request from the weird loner in one of her classes, who takes that acceptance as a sign that their friendship is firing on all cylinders immediately. Things get too intense, there's suicide, and people get haunted over Facebook. 

There's nothing to say here that every other reviewer hasn't commented on: it bears tremendous resemblance in plot to the 2014 movie Unfriended, and while they could have been coincidental and emblematic of the zeitgeist, the delay of this movie only serves to highlight how dated it is in concept, technology and production. I didn't enjoy Unfriended, bar the dedication to realism in conversational typing, but these kind of Social Media Horror Movies seem so of-an-era that watching one in 2017 must feel jarring. An obsession with the horrors of social media lasted in your core demographic for approximately two years, mid Facebook mania, and in that time we also got the far superior The Den, and now the use of the medium to convey ideas about vanity and fixation and being turned upon is something that feels relegated to thinkpieces by people who are convinced the internet is ruining the world. There are tiny specks of a good idea in here, where humans turn on each other and ghosts just had to set the objects in motion, but the whole movie seems confused. It wants to convey a cycle of mutual destruction and social evil but it doesn't want to do the legwork and it hasn't followed through on that, or on its own ghost logic. 

This movie might have been more annoying released in 2014, but it wouldn't have been any better. It still would have had the stilted performances from nearly everyone but our protagonist - Debnam-Carey works well with what little she has - and the weird, disjointed structure (why does it open with a professor announcing a suicide? It's setting up something that ultimately adds nothing by breaking up the linear structure, and then it never bothers again. It felt like an editing error). It still would have felt shrill and lacking follow through. It still would have treated its audience like idiots who'll gobble up any generic horror crap released in cinemas that uses a novelty - Facebook - as a hook. Gross. 

Rating: 2/10