Friend Request is the second “Facebook horror film” to receive wide release in the past two years. That number may either seem too high or too low to you, but it’s certainly fertile pop-culture territory: young, hip kids live their lives online and die for it, mwahaha.
This week’s new film (which, technically, came out in Germany in 2016) isn’t shy about aping the 2015 film Unfriended, and it liberally borrows from the likes of Black Mirror, as well. In good news, this unoriginal horror movie plays smart, funny, and breezy with its material, which is mostly the point of a good slasher flick anyway. It’s certainly not the ultimate “evils of Facebook” film, in terms of either social commentary or pointed, Facebook-related barbs, and its weak ending tanks some of the fun. But there’s still enough solid stuff here to make this a pleasant, beginning-of-autumn horror surprise.
“Zero friends?”