Friend Request Reviews

Laura Woodson (Alycia Debnam-Carey) is a popular, all-American college gal attending school in sunny Southern California. She boasts more than 800 Facebook friends, lives in a killer apartment, and is dating a hunky medical student. She also possesses a welcoming smile and an open heart, so it’s no surprise when she accepts a friend request on Facebook from Marina (Liesl Ahlers), a misfit, goth-like fellow psych student with zero social-media friends. Laura <I>is</I> a bit hesitant to do so at first, due to the macabre photos, drawings, and videos on Marina’s Facebook page. But, what the hell, she accepts it anyway. Huge mistake.   Marina now has a best friend, or so she thinks. Laura? She now has a stalker. Marina’s smothering presence, both online and in person, soon becomes so overbearing that Laura unfriends her -- an even bigger mistake. Marina is so distraught she commits suicide, which isn’t giving away anything since we learn Marina’s fate in the movie’s opening scene before the story backtracks two weeks to detail the events leading up to her death. But even though Marina is dead, she still haunts Laura from beyond the grave; not only does she start killing off her closest friends, but she then posts their grisly deaths on Laura’s Facebook account for all of her online acquaintances to see. Unsurprisingly, Laura’s number of “friends” soon plummets. How does Marina do all of this? Well, let’s just say witchcraft and wasps are involved. Lots of wasps!   The setup for Friend Request is solid enough for a conventional horror flick, and the first half hour or so is fairly interesting. Unfortunately, once the killings start the movie actually becomes less scary because the murders are so implausible and ridiculous. (Example: A possessed character literally bashes his brains out against the walls of an elevator. It plays like an outtake from The Happening.) It doesn’t help that all of Laura’s friends are stock characters (the hot blonde, the plain Jane, the chubby goofball, the tech whiz, etc.), so when they meet their cruel fates we just don’t care since we aren’t invested in their lives. The few jolts the movie provides are of the jump-scare variety, although director Simon Verhoeven’s use of animation to delve into Marina’s warped mind via her disturbing Facebook posts is eerie and quite effective. It’s too bad the entire movie wasn’t animated, but the filmmakers likely knew their flick was cartoonish enough already with the absurd aforementioned deaths and laughable lines like “Unfriend that dead bitch!”   Midway through the movie, a poster for A Streetcar Named Desire is prominently displayed in the background for inexplicable reasons. Yet it immediately brings to mind that film’s most iconic line, in which Blanche DuBois, while being led away to a mental hospital, says, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” And that’s sort of what Marina does here, at least before she goes all Blair Witch on everyone. Speaking of strangers, here’s a dependable word from one: Reject this movie’s friend request. You can thank us later.