There’s not much to like in Facebook fright tale ‘Friend Request’

In the age of social media, is being alone the ultimate horror? The mildly creepy thriller “Friend Request” takes Facebook anxiety and turns it into a supernatural nightmare. While that’s not a bad idea for a thriller, this footage is unlikely to go viral.

Laura (Alycia Debnam-Carey of “Fear the Walking Dead”) is a popular college student who has a smile for everybody. Throughout the movie, we see an onscreen tally of her Facebook friends count: more than 800 as the story begins. It increases by the second.

One day during a psychology lecture, Laura catches the eye of Marina (Liesl Ahlers), a shy, pale transfer student in a black hoodie who, most unusually, has zero friends on Facebook.

That is, until Laura accepts her friend request.

Marina is an artist whose timeline is full of violent, gothic black-and-white animations that look suspiciously like the ad campaign for a horror movie. When Marina becomes overly possessive, Laura reluctantly unfriends her, and Marina kills herself.

Or does she? A grisly video of the suicide mysteriously appears on Laura’s timeline, and this once-popular girl’s friend count starts to drop.

German director Simon Verhoeven (who co-wrote the script with Matthew Ballen and Philip Koch) taps into a hot-button issue with the potential to fuel a socially relevant thriller. But the filmmakers miss that opportunity, never bothering to develop their characters. Marina ought to resonate with anyone who has ever felt like an outsider, but the movie’s only creative personality is depicted as a mere weirdo, her talent for hacking persisting from beyond the grave.

Despite a few well-timed jump scares, “Friend Request” never really builds much tension. The repetitive score evokes a different kind of horror than you might expect: the fear that you’re about to watch a feature-length Facebook commercial, populated with vapid, interchangeable characters.

The recent social-media comedy-drama “Ingrid Goes West,” while flawed, got more mileage out of its similarly resonant theme. More violent but less sharp, “Friend Request” is an indictment of contemporary society, couched in a gruesome yet predictable package.

It’s times like this when you wish there were a dislike button.

This story was originally published September 21, 2017 at 3:15 PM with the headline "There’s not much to like in Facebook fright tale ‘Friend Request’."