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Vincenzo de Divitiis
•Laura is one of the most popular girls in college, and her notoriety is reflected on Facebook, where she posts dozens of photos and status updates a day and can boast hundreds of friendships; a few desks further on, in a lost and secluded corner of the classroom, there is Marina, a course mate who is totally the opposite with 0 friends on Facebook and a very introverted character due to childhood traumas and a rather unsettling appearance. The two girls' destinies cross when Marina asks Laura for friendship, with the latter being impressed by the macabre animation videos present on the mysterious girl's wall. A friendship that, in reality, turns into a real nightmare for the protagonist, literally tormented by her new acquaintance, who lives the relationship in a morbid and obsessive way. A situation that leads Laura to delete Marina from her friends list, causing the latter's suicide and triggering a series of chain reactions with tragic consequences for herself and her friends.
Since the 1970s, horror cinema has decided to abandon its classic attire, made exclusively of vampires, witches, and crumbling castles, to take a stylistic and conceptual turn aimed at criticizing contemporary society with all its uses and customs. If, in the past, the target of famous and not-so-famous directors was the use of drugs, politics, and television, now the focus could not help but shift to the phenomenon that more than any other has overturned our habits: social networks.
A trend that, over the past fifteen years, has given rise to a mini-genre that we could almost define as "Horror 2.0" or "Cyber Horror," whose major titles are "The Call," "Pulse," "Kairo," and the recent "Unfriended." To these, we can now add "Friend Request - Death Has Your Profile" by German director Simon Verhoeven, a horror film excellent in its intentions, anything but banal in addressing the topic of Facebook addiction, but not very impactful when it comes to scaring and handling the stylistic elements of the genre.
Verhoeven, who has nothing to do with the much more famous Paul, demonstrates appreciable skills in creating a homogeneous, smooth, and obstacle-free plot and, above all, main characters who, as much as possible in this type of film, show well-defined and changing characters throughout the story. It is evident that, around the characters of Marina and Laura, the German director builds much of his discourse on how Facebook has changed our conception of friendship and how a simple request or the number of friends have become the thermometer to measure popularity and self-esteem. It is no coincidence, in this sense, that the escalation of murders and the consequent publication of the videos on Laura's wall are marked by captions indicating how the girl loses friends until she reaches zero, which coincides with death even in reality.
A narrative structure that, in the end, scares the viewer a lot because everything is so close and adherent to reality that anyone can feel potentially in the shoes of the protagonist.
In short, the premises for a scary and memorable horror film would all be there, and yet "Friend Request" fails precisely at the best moment, and the aforementioned attention to the sociological aspect of social networks ends up making Verhoeven forget the true goal of his film. The construction of tension, in fact, is rather weak, the photography does not contribute to creating unsettling and enveloping atmospheres, on the contrary, it seems to almost create reassuring environments, blood flows in minimal doses, and the only element that works is the theme of witchcraft, here addressed properly thanks to the animations present on Marina's profile and also projected onto old and suggestive black mirrors.
Very positive are the performances of the two protagonists Alycia Debnam-Carey and Liesl Ahlers: the first plays the beautiful and popular Laura, a girl who is available, sunny, and sociable; the second, on the other hand, takes on the role of a dark young woman whose look, which in some ways reminds that of the villain in "Kristy," stands out as the protagonist of what must be considered in every respect the only great unsettling scene of the film. The rest of the cast, on the other hand, aligns itself with conventional and impalpable performances, as simple pawns on a chessboard already known to the public.
"Friend Request - Death Has Your Profile," in conclusion, is a film as intelligent and well-written as it is revisable on the front of entertainment. Nevertheless, the director's intention deserves to be rewarded.
