She is close friends with Kobe and is dating Tyler McCormick. She lives with Olivia Mathison, Isabelle, and Gustavo Garcia, Isabelle's boyfriend.
These things aren't much, but when dealing with something as stale and formulaic as "Friend Request," you have to take what you can get.Laura Woodson is a popular college student with over 800 friends on Facebook.
#FRIEND REQUEST 2017 FULL MOVIE SERIES#
There are flashes of inspiration here, such as repeated references to internet addiction (without any legitimate point, except that it literally will kill you), an unsettling and dynamic shot of rows of computer monitors illuminating a dark room with images of the face and eye of the spirit, and, most notably, a series of animations that tell the story of Marina's lonely, unfortunate past without the witchy hokum. None of it really matters, because the movie's sole purpose is to get each of the characters alone in a dark space, toss some unsettling sights and sounds their way, and, to top it off, have something pop on screen, with some loud growls and screams accompanying it. All of the movie's mythology is explained in a flashback, which involves a coven of witches, a devastating fire, a boarding school, and a couple of child murders. Laura and her friends-including her boyfriend Tyler ( William Moseley), her jealous ex Kobe ( Connor Paolo), and her best friend Olivia ( Brit Morgan)-look into Marina's past to determine how this is happening. Their limit, apparently, was a third video showing someone's bloody death. This means that a few hundred people thought that someone posting two suicide videos was fine. The last count we actually see has her hovering around 80 friends, and that's after three suicide videos appear on her page. It's probably an unintentional bit of social commentary that she still has hundreds of friends after two such videos are posted to her page. The ghost in the machine takes control of Laura's page, posting videos of her friends killing themselves in gruesome ways, starting with Marina, who hangs herself over a roaring fire.Īs her online friends-all of whom the evil spirt tags in the posts-start to see the videos, they begin to unfriend Laura.
The movie's deaths are-uncomfortably, since it's simply a gimmicky hook-centered on suicide or, better, demonic possessions that make the deaths look like it. Laura might have figured that out if she had scrolled down to the "See older posts" part of the page. Against Laura is the fact that Marina's own social networking profile was filled with clues about an unstable personality, such as unsettling photos of mangled faces and a video of someone stomping on a doll's head. In Laura's defense, we learn from a lengthy, sort-of flashback that Marina was a cyber-stalker, who commented on every one of her posts, sent her repeated video chat requests, and started following her around in real life. The angle is that the supernatural killer is the spirit of a college girl named Marina ( Liesl Ahlers), who committed suicide after Laura unfriended her on the safe-from-claims-of-copyright-infringement website. The only requirement is that the screenplay (written by Matthew Ballen, Philip Koch, and Verhoeven) provides an angle that seems a bit different, if only to distract from how familiar the rest of the movie's game is.
In the process, some evil force is picking them off by supernatural means. You probably know the drill by this point: The plot is a mystery, in which the characters-the ones who haven't been killed off, of course-have to figure out the reason that their friends are dying one at a time.
#FRIEND REQUEST 2017 FULL MOVIE MOVIE#
This is what the movie promises from the start, so there must be at least a few points awarded for truth in advertising, I suppose. Director Simon Verhoeven dutifully gives us multiple jump scares, in which an arm violently enters into frame or a face is suddenly in complete close-up on the screen. One could say that it doesn't disappoint, although one would also have to lower the bar of expectations to say that in a way that possesses any significance.