FRIEND REQUEST: Report As Spam

I think the last time I looked at the number of Facebook friends I had, George W. Bush was in office. I could have 180, I could have 450 — who knows? Using Facebook isn’t about amassing friends. In fact, people go out of their way to get unwanted opinions off their feed, in search of a timeline perfectly curated to reflect only the people you care to hear from.

Friend Request, the latest addition to the social media horror subgenre, which assumes that people actually care a whole lot about how many Facebook friends they have, unsurprisingly has very little to say about technology and even less to say about friends.

The film, from director Simon Verhoeven, had a post-production tenure that must’ve been demoralizing for all involved. Originally slated for 2014 under an even worse title (Unknown Error), it was postponed due to the concurrent release of Unfriended before being released in Germany in January of last year as Unfriend, and then finally released last weekend as Friend Request.

The movie purports that a Facebook friend request from a friendless goth girl, whose primary fashion influence is Rooney Mara’s tattooed girl, is more insidious than one from a cleavage bot. And probably a worse follow too. Laura, a popular college student, accepts the goth’s titular friend request, only to end up the target of some netherworldly cyberbullying. After Marina (the goth) is told that she’s abusing her new relationship with Laura (constantly posting on her wall, video calling her, photoshopping each other into photos, etc.), Marina hangs herself and recedes into the realm of the dead.

Marina then becomes a witch hacker, and boy, if you thought Marina’s pre-death content was weak as hell, her post-death content doesn’t get any better. Her aesthetic transitions from The Nightmare Before Christmas ripoff animations to videos culled from The Ring’s B-roll footage. When she’s not busy shitposting The Ring fan fic, Marina is conjuring evil forces from The Occult to murder Laura’s friends one-by-one, then posting videos of their deaths on Facebook through Laura’s account. As dumb as this sounds, I suppose it was about time witches shed their longstanding Luddite status and start using the internet to their advantage.

What the film gets wrong about Facebook

The central conceit of the film is that, because Laura wasn’t “a good friend” to Marina, she will make sure she has no friends. To cement the stakes of this dynamic, there’s a running ticker of Laura’s dwindling Facebook friend count that intermittently appears on screen a la Lucy’s expanding brain percentage. But somehow, Friend Request’s use of this running ticker manages to make even less sense than Besson’s film.

Laura has become a social pariah and enemy of the state due to all these murder videos being posted on her Facebook page. When she claims she’s been hacked, her friends, the college dean and the police demand that she deletes her account. When she tries to explain that she can’t, they don’t believe her. In other words, why does her friend count matter when she’s actively trying to delete the entire account? And further, if she has no more friends on Facebook, no one else will be able to see the videos, thus Marina’s long con to deplete Laura’s friend count is a self-own.

The other irony of Friend Request is that Laura’s friends suck. It’s not even so much that they’re poorly drawn characters, but that they actually suck as people. None of them show her any compassion or empathy. Her boyfriend —  whose Tinder bio would look something like “Med student. Surfer. Looking for a smart girl who still knows how to party.” — is too busy being jealous that she’s had a conversation with any other male. And the only friend willing to help — her coding buddy, who’s committing hard to his perpetual 10 o’clock shadow — secretly wants to f*ck her.

Friend Request as a Genre Exercise

Outside of the film’s problems with logic, it also fails as a genre piece. Simon Verhoeven relies on what feels like images found from a Shutterstock search for “scary movie.” It doesn’t have anything terrifying to introduce. Instead, an amalgam of generic imagery drawn from the tired well of The Occult — there’s a long sequence that tries to shoehorn in something about the ancient use of black mirrors — is pitch hitting for an actual development of its own mythology.

Speaking of black mirrors, I couldn’t help but think of Black Mirror as a juxtaposition of how to foreground terror within digital natives in order to interrogate behaviors and fears. That show would’ve done something allegorical with the idea that she can’t delete her account, or something purposeful with the idea that though the stakes hang on her friend count, her friends are terrible. Instead, Friend Request lets its loaded topics lay flaccid, working against itself.

It’s interesting that Friend Request was released just a couple weeks after It. It’s (very successful) marketing was built on the text’s monolithic iconography. Even though the film doesn’t fully utilize the built-in terror of the clown to its advantage, that clown’s face is getting asses in seats. Friend Request, on the other hand, has nothing to intrigue theater goers. The first I heard of the film was seeing a poster that was cut into two panels: one to show Laura’s ass and one to show her face — clearly a cheap attempt to drum up any excitement possible. It’s going to be hard for the film to even squeeze out a wash on its meager $10 million budget, which makes its open-for-a-sequel ending look like wishful thinking.

Is Friend Request a bad social media horror film, or is it just another installment in a bad subgenre? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Friend Request is currently in US theaters and was released in the UK all the way back in 2016.