![]() ![]() The film's idea of building dread is having characters investigate noises down dark hallways and entering even darker rooms, and in spite of its R-rating, constantly cutting away before a death scene. In fact, “Internet Addiction Disorder” is touched upon a few times to probably sound of the moment, but the intriguing seed that begins in “Friend Request” just lazily devolves into an ineffectual slasher, laden with overbearing fright tactics of supposedly creepy faces emerging from the darkness and popping real close into the frame. Disbelief must certainly be suspended in a story where a spirit controls Internet code and turns it into a code resembling the symbols of dark magic, but this script is just downright silly and never terribly smart in using technology and social media. Despite this being director Simon Verhoeven’s English-language debut, that doesn’t mean it’s deserving of a pass. In an age where so many horror films are knocking it out of the park, it’s movies like “Friend Request” that give the too often spit-upon genre a bad name and make one almost want to give 2002’s unpleasant “FearDotCom” a second chance. Not only are the lives of Laura’s closest pals lost, but her 800-plus Facebook friends dwindles to such a precipitous degree that Laura will soon feel as lonely as Marina did. ![]() As each friend around Laura dies, their recorded death is posted to her profile, and neither the video nor her profile can be deleted. Laura receives the suicide video on her Facebook wall, and following Marina’s death (even though the police cannot actually locate her body), she and her friends have their computers commandeered by Marina’s angry ghost (or something). The final straw comes when Laura decides to unfriend Marina on Facebook, triggering Marina to hang herself over a circle of fire while filming it on her laptop. Once pictures of Laura’s dinner party start trickling through on Facebook, Marina immediately feels rejected. Once Laura scrolls through her new friend’s posts of darkly artistic but disturbing self-created animation videos and keeps receiving needy messages and video chats from Marina, Laura tries distancing herself and decides not to invite Marina to her birthday dinner with her close-knit group of friends, also including crestfallen, tech-savvy Kobe (Connor Paolo) and Isabel’s boyfriend Gustavo (Sean Marquette). Laura is such a nice girl on campus that she even gives the time of day to weird goth classmate Marina Mills (Liesl Ahlers), who hides under a black hoodie, and becomes the loner’s first and only friend on Facebook. She has a hunky pre-med boyfriend, Tyler (William Moseley), and shares an apartment with her two best friends, feisty blonde Olivia (Brit Morgan) and equally feisty Isabel (Brooke Markham). At a California university, popular psychology major Laura Woodson (Alycia Debnam-Carey) seems to have it all. ![]()
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