From that point forward all the periphery adults couldn’t act more unrealistically or unprofessionally if they actively tried.
As far as Verhoeven’s movie is concerned, that step comes almost immediately after Marina kills herself and the video she made ends up on Laura’s Facebook wall. But there becomes a point where things can get taken a step too far. Look, people doing dumb things in a horror movie is par for the course. The unforgivable element is just how beyond stupid every single person in authority, whether they be a college administrator, a police detective, a parent, a Facebook help desk clerk or even a run-of-the-mill taxi driver, all prove to be. These ideas are heavy-handed to the point of being didactic, extended bits where Laura is coming to grips with the reality that she didn’t exactly make the best choices in regards to sharing so much of her life online tiresomely obvious. He also paces things nicely, and for the most part I can’t say I was ever squirming in my seat in boredom wishing the film would end.īut the script, as timely as it is trying desperately to be, talking about internet, cyberculture and how the youth and young adults of today are slowly losing their identities to an online realm where individuality, anonymity and privacy are a thing of the past, does not work very well.
Additionally, Verhoeven knows how to maximize the creep factor, a sense of omnipresent dread permeating things all the way through no matter how ludicrous events eventually become. She grounds the story with an intense, emotionally complex performance that’s far more interesting than I felt the film itself deserved. First of all, Debnam-Carey, a relative newcomer likely best known for 2014’s Into the Storm and a featured role on AMC’s “Fear the Walking Dead,” is quite good as Laura. Let’s start with what gets excited about the movie. It almost works, many elements of this little thriller far more effectively unsettling than they have any right to be, and if not for some serious instances of unparalleled stupidity there might have been something creepily fun here to talk about. Director and co-writer Simon Verhoeven’s ( Men in the City) confection is a pretty standard genre yarn, one filled with many of the requisite shrieks and shocks one comes to expect from these sorts of efforts.
The 2016 German-produced horror yarn Friend Request plays like an uneasy combination of Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of The Ring, the underwhelming 2015 modest cybernetic hit Unfriended and a more supernaturally inclined variation on Barbet Schroeder’s 1992 favorite Single White Female. Marina doesn’t take kindly to rejection, and even after filming herself committing suicide and posting the video online, she’s still going to make certain all of Laura’s friends and loved ones, including both her current boyfriend Tyler ( William Moseley) as well as her ex, computer whiz Kobe ( Connor Paolo), face her wrath. In a fit of fear, frustration and anger, she unfriends her new Facebook BFF, and in doing so sparks a supernatural maelstrom that will rip her life to shreds. It’s almost as if Marina is stalking her, trying to insert herself into every facet of Laura’s life even though they’ve just started getting to know one another.