httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDNgs0dgjj4
Just like the new movie Friend Request, these films are often laughably ignorant of why the internet is popular in the first place, how it basically works, and what really makes it really scary.
Friend Request is the tale of a college student named Laura, who has over 800 friends on Facebook, and who is perversely fascinated when she meets Marina, a girl who has none.
Laura accepts Marina’s friend request but is repulsed when Marina wants to be treated like an actual friend.
Friend Request doesn’t have the psychological depth or even the sense of humor necessary to pick social media culture apart, which is a shame, because anyone who spends any amount of time on the internet knows just how scary it can be.
The problem is that Friend Request thinks the technology is scarier than the people who wield it.
When Laura asks a friend to figure out what’s wrong with her account, he discovers that the code for her Facebook has magic symbols in it, and that’s not disturbing.
It’s a pretty ironic perspective for the film to have, since Marina is a talented artist with actual interests outside of social media, and Laura’s “Actual” friends are superficial cyphers who seem to have no interests outside of Laura’s problems and taking selfies.
Which might have been a meaningful commentary about the shallowness of social media culture, except Friend Request doesn’t indict Laura and her friends, it indicts the woman whom their callousness drove to suicide.