Weekly Film Review: Friend Request

‘Friend Request’ is a supernatural, psychological horror film and the themes that run through this film are death, violence, isolation, friendship and envy. This was directed by Simon Verhoeven, cinematography by Jo Heim and edited by Denis Bachter. The production companies of this film are Wiedemann& Berg film, Seven Pictures Film and distributed by Warner Bros. This film was released on the 20^th April 2016. It was an English film, but was made in Germany; hence the confusion of different names as it is called ‘unfriend’ in Germany; however causes confusion as there is another film called ‘unfriended’. The film was shot in Cape Town, South Africa. Though the film was produced by German director Simon Verhoeven and German production companies, the largely English-speaking cast required the film to be shot in English. Filming ended in March 2014.  The box office of this film was $5.9 million.

In the first scene, the ‘warner bro’ credit scene was shown not how it originally is shown, this scene was shown in a horror themed, showing several glitches when the Warner Bro’s logo was shown, indicating that this film has something to do with a computer screen.  This also immediately shows that this film is a horror film too. The sound had several beats and went silent; this was a way of building up tension, already gathering the audience’s attention.

In the first few minutes, the first scene in the film is a wide shot of an institute, which indicates an idea that this story revolves around teenagers. Again, the scene after, there is a wide shot of the lecture room, which indicates that this film is based around teenagers, giving the idea that this will attract a youthful audience. The next scene is of the people sitting down and on the front bench is of two girls, which suggests that they are important roles to the film; foreshadowing that there is a female protagonist. The next scene is of a close up shot of the female’s facial expression; her face begins to tremble when she finds out that ‘Marina’ is dead. This shows the audience that she has some sort of link to the death and that this film evolves around this storyline. Furthermore, the scene showing her face depicts that she is our female protagonist.

The screen goes completely blank and shows a longshot of a female’s bedroom and says ‘two weeks earlier’ which highlights that the previous scene was a flashback. In addition, the audience see a lot of scenes of Facebook, which can make the audience feel like they are watching it from the screen in the shoes of the girl. All the characters are introduced by their Facebook profiles, the audience learn that the protagonist’s name is Laura. This film empathises the colour black, which connotes death, lifelessness, and evil. 

The meaning of this film is for people to watch who they have as their friends online and to be wise about it. Many people have this social network known as ‘Facebook’ which attracts a wide audience range of all ages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDNgs0dgjj4