Friend Request
Director: Simon Verhoeven
Talent: Alycia Debnam-Carey, William Moseley, Brit Morgan, Liesl Ahlers
Released: 20th April
Laura (Debnam-Carey) has it all: great friends, a hot med-student/surfer beau, good grades in her psychology course, and a swinging social life, all of which is evidenced by her Facebook profile. But when she accepts a friend request from Marina (Ahlers), a pale, quiet girl from class with a new profile and a fascination with creepy imagery, things start to change.
Friend Request is unusual in terms of contemporary American horror films in that it cuts back on the now ubiquitous jump-scares (though there’s still two or three) and contains some quite extended scenes of a pretty graphic nature as its story unfolds. As in, it’s not as easy to watch this with the practised disdain of the film critic as, say, Jason Zada’s The Forest of earlier this year. It’s big and stupid, yes, and the way women’s bodies continue to be shot — fragmented, fetishised — seemingly as a matter of course in the genre is objectionable, certainly, but Friend Request is also heartless and gruesome in the way that proper horror movies really ought to be.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
