Friend Request (2016)

Friend Request arrives from 2016 with the confidence of a film that believes it has something to say about the internet, and the misfortune of saying almost none of it. Laura is a popular campus student with eight hundred Facebook friends. She accepts a request from the lonely Marina, unfriends her shortly after, and the consequences arrive in the form of a demonic spirit with a taste for black mirrors and wasps. The cast is uniformly white and uniformly doomed, an arrangement the film never notices, much less examines. Cape Town substitutes for an American campus, and that is the least of the substitutions.

Marina is the film's most interesting problem. Her hair-pulling disorder and bald spot are staged as a public humiliation, then as evidence of instability, which the screenplay treats as one short step from genuine possession. No attempt is made to understand her. No feminist reading of the women emerges either, since they exist to be victimized by a vengeful ghost with a grudge and a laptop. The film gestures at the cruelties of online popularity, but its target is the mechanics of the platform, not the loneliness the platform produces.

The film settles for a cautionary tale told through jump scares and a swarm of black wasps, which is a legitimate approach and a lazy one. The moral, such as it is, amounts to this: be kinder to the strange girl, or she will haunt your feed. The epilogue, in which Laura inherits Marina's predatory gaze, wants to land as a chilling loop. It plays as a shrug. The practical effects earn their keep. A film about connection that cannot connect.