“Friend Request” is the latest horror movie flop to hit the big screen. The movie follows the main character, Laura, who receives a friend request from a goth girl in her class named Marina. The girl then proceeds to stalk her on Facebook. When Laura looks at Marina’s Facebook, she discovers that she is Marina’s only friend, and that Marina posts disturbing videos and art on her Facebook timeline. After Marina aggressively invites Laura to her birthday party, Laura unfriends her. As a result, Marina commits suicide with a satanic ritual and then begins killing Laura’s friends. Then the movie kind of just ends. Let me just get this out here immediately: do not see this movie. It is not worth your time or your money.
“Friend Request” had few redeeming qualities. It had good production value, so you know they spent the budget of the film on lighting and the set instead of good writing or acting. The only legitimately good quality of the movie was the jump scares. I do not particularly like jump scares because I think that they are a cheap way to shock the audience. However, “Friend Request” had some good build up to its jump scares. In fact, it had some of the best jump scares that I have seen in recent movies. However, they overused them, and they became too predictable and not as effective as the movie went on.
OK, now that the extremely few niceties are over, it’s time to start flaming this movie. This was literally one of the worst movies that I have ever seen. It’s not a good start when I go into a theater and my friend and I were the only two there. The characters are supposedly college students, even though one girl looks like she’s 45, and they post on Facebook like 14-year-olds. The characters are completely one-dimensional, and most of them are introduced with the sole purpose of having them killed off.
The main actors have no chemistry with each other either. Laura is played by Alycia Debnam-Carey, in what I hope is her last role ever. In several scenes, she was supposed to be crying out of fear, but she was most likely crying from the realization that her career was going nowhere after this movie. Alycia Debnam-Carey and William Moseley, who played Laura’s boyfriend, are supposed to be Americans, but their accents don’t match this fact. Halfway through, they would change from fake-sounding American accent to a slightly British accent.
The characters did not seem to have any interpersonal relationships at all. Laura’s mother is made out to be a central figure to the plot, yet she is barely introduced. She reemerges near the end of the movie, but the movie then forgets that she exists and the subplot is magically resolved. This seems to be the running theme of the movie: unresolved subplots. Laura mentions in the opening montage of the film that her father passed away several years prior and references him throughout the film as her inspiration to become a psychologist. This little tidbit, seemingly important at first, is then never referenced again. Red herring, anyone?
In addition to the unresolved conflict, the movie itself is unresolved. I’m not going to give any spoilers, but the main plot basically ends before there is a resounding conclusion. It was very unsatisfying overall.
Production value aside, everything about this movie was just awful. The movie didn’t even get the licensing from Facebook to use its logos. This was one of the first things to grab my attention in the movie, and it doesn’t really take away from the plot (which, mind you, is non-exist), but just reinforces how bad this movie was. “Friend Request” reminds me of lettuce: there’s something there, but it’s not appetizing at all and it doesn’t really serve a purpose. Do not pay to see this movie. If you find it on Netflix one day, and you and your friends want to make fun of it, then watching the movie would be somewhat justified. This is one friend request that I would deny. I would give “Friend Request” one out of five stars, and I feel like even that is too much.