Be careful who you click with.
Friend Request, also known as Unfriend, is a 2016 English-language German horror film directed by Simon Verhoeven, starring Alycia Debnam-Carey, William Moseley, Connor Paolo, Brit Morgan, Brooke Markham, Sean Marquette, and Liesl Ahlers.
Laura is a popular college student who graciously accepts an online friend request from Marina, a young social outcast. To everyone's shock, Marina takes her own life after Laura decides to unfriend her. Soon, a disturbing and mysterious video appears on Laura's profile (which can't be removed) and her contacts slowly dwindle. When her friends suddenly begin to die one by one, the frightened young woman must figure out a way to stop the carnage before it's too late.
Friend Request contains the following tropes:
- Abandoned Area:
- Moore's Grove, a deserted farm town that was once home to a commune run by a mysterious pagan cult. Marina's mother Ada Nedifar was a member of said cult, and Marina was conceived at the compound, before the place burned to the ground in the 1990s. On the surface, only the charred walls of the compound remain; however, some hidden subterranean rooms survived (with their occult accoutrements intact).
- The factory at Saddle Mills, where Marina carries out her suicide ritual and the film's climax takes place, also qualifies. It still has power, but is deserted and doesn't appear to be in use.
- Adults Are Useless: Marina's childhood teachers, and the adults running the orphanage, were completely unable to protect her from bullies.
- When Laura's Facebook page is hijacked (with graphic video of Marina's suicide posted to the timeline), tech support is unable to remove the offending content or deactivate the page. Nor are they able to do anything when the same happens with videos of Laura's friends. (To be fair, the page itself is cursed, which prevents it from being altered or removed.)
- A Fate Worse Than Death: Laura loses her friends, her boyfriend, her reputation, and watches the people she's closest to and her only living relative die horribly before she is taken over by Marina — losing her body, mind, and (possibly) her soul as well. She also loses her looks, as Marina has seemingly begun pulling out Laura's hair and neglecting her personal grooming.
- Alliterative Name: Marina Mills.
- All Love Is Unrequited: Kobe is implied at various points to have feelings for Laura. While we don't get the full details—it's never said if they were ever a couple, but we see some old photos of them together that imply Kobe at least was hoping for a relationship—by the present day, Laura is dating Tyler, leaving Kobe visibly bitter on the subject.
- Ambiguous Situation:
- The Moore's Grove fire is never explained. We see a news report that mentions that the commune was believed to house a demon-worshiping cult, and that a suspect in the fire was taken into custody; did someone get wind of what was going on there and take matters into their own hands? Or was the fire was carried out by the cultists themselves — perhaps as a Ritual Suicide to transfer power to Marina in the womb? The runes on Ada Nedifar's belly hint that she was attempting some sort of magic with her unborn daughter, and might have even anticipated her own death; however, there's no explanation of what the runes mean or when Ada made them; they might have been a simple protection spell, enacted to ensure Marina's survival — possibly at the last second, after Ada was caught in the fire.
- Were the Moore's Grove cultists actually demon worshipers, or simply misunderstood neo-pagans with practices that looked evil to outsiders? Marina believes it's the latter: she carries out rituals (presumably the same sort once practiced by the Moore's Grove cultists) ascribed to witches, inscribes Laura's Facebook page with runes that are described as "Wiccan", and one of her Facebook posts has an animation of the burning compound with the caption, "We destroy what we don't other understand". However, Marina's suicide allows her to rise from the dead as an explicitly evil, demonic, murderous entity, which later takes possession of Laura's body and steals it from her—all of which are strictly attributed to dark occultism. At least one neo-pagan viewer
posits that the cult was devoted to the worship of the demon Sathariel.
- Big Eater: Izzy (who is the fattest of Laura's friends) craves chocolate.
- Body Horror: Quite a bit:
- Marina's demonic, undead form is essentially a giant wasp nest covered in burnt, rotting flesh. With the wasps emerging from holes in the bald spot on her head.
- The recurring image of two dead boys with swollen, misshapen, mutilated faces. They're Marina's first victims, two bullies who were stung to death by her wasps.
- The animation on Marina's Facebook of a heavily pregnant woman with her face burned down to the bone and runes carved in the charred flesh of her belly — who later appears in person at the hospital during Izzy's vision. It represents Marina's mother, who was declared brain dead after being caught in the fire that burned her commune to the ground.
- Born from a Dead Woman: Laura and Kobe discover that Marina's mother, Ada, was severely injured in the fire that destroyed Moore's Grove; after she was declared brain dead, her body was kept alive on life support for months until Marina could be delivered by C-section.
- The Chosen One: There are several hints that Marina has connections to the deity worshiped by the Moore's Grove cult and may even be its avatar: she was Born from a Dead Woman, and apparently possessed supernatural abilities from an early age (including the power to summon wasps out of nowhere and control electronic devices). That her ritualistic suicide succeeds in resurrecting her as a powerful entity (and that she was apparently the only person attached to the cult who successfully managed to do so) further alludes to this.
- Commune: Moore's Grove, which mysteriously burned to the ground in the mid-1990s, was home to a pagan cult that was rumored to be demonic. Marina's mother was a member prior to her death, and Marina herself was conceived there (and may have ties to the entity worshipped by the cult).
- Creepy Child: Marina was one. A worker at the orphanage says that she was always alone, watching creepy videos on the computer (or staring at its black screen), and that she "gave the other children nightmares". This form of Marina appears briefly in the film's climax.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Nearly everyone in the film suffers a horrible death — all at the hands of Marina. However, some are worse than others: Marina commits suicide by hanging herself over a fire (giving her a horrible two-for-one death); Gustavo is stung by black wasps and bashes his head open on the walls of an elevator; Olivia is attacked by wasps, thrown out a hospital window, then possessed and forced to shoot herself in the head; and Kobe is stung to death by wasps.
- Dark Magical Girl: Marina, very much so. She's a powerful dark witch, and has been alone her entire life — beginning before she was born (her mother suffered brain death after being caught in a house fire, and was kept on life support until Marina could be delivered).
- Demonic Possession: One of Undead!Marina's primary abilities. She uses it to control some of Laura's friends (and later, her mother) and force them to mutilate and kill themselves. At the end of the film, she also takes control of Laura's body.
- Disproportionate Retribution:
- Marina commits suicide, turns into a vengeful spirit, systematically murders six people, and completely ruins Laura's life and reputation and steals her body...because Laura lied about not inviting Marina to her birthday party, and unfriended her on Facebook. (Both of which only happened in the first place because Marina's clingy, stalker-esque behavior and disturbing artwork frightened Laura.)
- Gustavo and Laura's mother haven't even met Marina; she murders both of them in horrible ways, just because they represent things that she can never have (a friend and a living mother, respectively). Gustavo is an especially egregious case, as he's barely Laura's friend in the first place, only spending time with her because he's dating her friend, Isabelle.
- Downer Ending: Every major character in the film is killed by Marina, except for Laura, who becomes possessed. The film ends with Possessed!Laura — now going by "Lau Ra", and looking very much like Marina once did — sitting alone in the cafeteria of a new university, gazing sadly at a group of girls at a nearby table (who look on with disgust and pity) before glancing down at her now friend-less Facebook account. Laura has become Marina in mind, body, and soul, and will likely spend the rest of her life lonely and rejected, a mere passenger in her own body. Not even Marina-in-Laura gets a happy ending, as her actions have left Laura as alone as she was in her first life. There's also the very real possibility that the cycle will repeat itself when Marina-in-Laura tries to make new friends.
- Face–Heel Turn: Kobe assists Laura throughout the film, even helping her break into Marina's dorm room to search for clues and illicitly searching the hospital's database for Marina's records. However, when he realizes he's destined to become Marina's next victim, he turns on Laura and tries to fatally stab her (even killing Tyler when he tries to save her).
- Familiar: Marina's are black wasps, which she can summon out of nowhere. They protect her by threatening and attacking her tormenters.
- Final Girl: Laura is the last survivor amongst her friend group.
- Friendless Background: Laura is the first friend Marina has ever had.
- Ghastly Ghost: Marina's undead form is an eight-foot tall monstrosity with blackened lips and gums, stringy hair, sharpened teeth, and a living wasp nest for a body (complete with papery skin and wasps emerging from the bald patches in her scalp).
- Goth Girls Know Magic: Marina dresses (mostly) in black, practices a pagan religion, and creates eerie, surreal black and white artwork. She also happens to be a powerful witch.
- Granola Girl: Marina's mother, Ada Nedifar, lived at a pagan commune, dressed in gauzy clothes, and wore lots of bangles and jewelry.
- How We Got Here: The film opens with Laura and Liv learning about Marina's suicide in class. The film then flashes back to "Two Weeks Earlier" to show the events that led up to Marina's suicide.
- Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Laura has golden-brown hair and dresses in whites and jewel tones, while Marina is dark-haired and invariably dresses in dark colors.
- Loners Are Freaks: Marina lives alone, has no family or friends (literally, with her Facebook profile showing a friend count of zero), and always sits by herself. She also hides her face beneath a hood, and has a habit of pulling out her own hair. Laura's friends call her a freak, but Laura takes pity on Marina and tries to befriend her...only for Marina's clingy, strange behavior to drive her away.
- Magic Mirror: Marina uses the screen of her laptop (on which she films her suicide) as a modern version of a black scrying mirror. This allows her soul to use it — and by extension, all reflective surfaces — as portals. (She seems to have a preference for the blackened screens of electronic devices.)
- Meaningful Name: Marina's last name, Nedifar, is an anagram for "A Friend".
- Monster Clown: A child's black and white drawing of a fanged clown (representing Marina's troubled childhood) appears on her Facebook page. The same image later appears to her victims.
- Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Marina is a loner who dresses in black, practices witchcraft, and makes surreal, disturbing artwork and animations.
- No Communities Were Harmed: Crossing over somewhat with Where the Hell Is Springfield?. Location tags on the characters' social media pages places the film's plot in the fictional Californian city of "Newkirk." The movie was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, but is done in a way that (mostly) passes for a generic coastal Californian city like Los Angeles or San Diego. Nearby communities mentioned include Moore's Grove and Saddle Mills, which are equally fictional (the former being where Marina was conceived, the latter being the location of a derelict factory where Marina went to kill herself). The film's final scene has Laura, now possessed by Marina, attending "Salem University" in the Oregon city of the same name. No such university exists in the real life city.
- People Puppet: Marina uses this method to make people kill themselves, making Gustavo bash his head against the walls of an elevator, Olivia throw herself out a window and shoot herself in the head, and Izzy (and presumably Laura's mother) slit their own throats.
- Plot-Triggering Death: Marina's suicide kicks off the events of the film.
- Religion of Evil: The Moore's Grove commune was allegedly centered on demon worship. Marina carries on their practices.
- Revenge: Laura, Marina's first (and only) friend, excludes her from her birthday celebration (while lying about it) and un-friends her on Facebook. Marina commits suicide and returns as a vengeful entity, vowing to make Laura know what it feels like to be alone. In the end, she succeeds.
- Ritual Suicide:
- Marina's death is one: Kobe learns that witches who were trapped by their enemies would sometimes commit suicide in front of a scrying mirror, which allowed them to return as vengeful spirits. Marina uses her laptop's screen for this purpose.
- The burning of the Moore's Grove commune may also have been one: while a news article fire says that the fire was believed to have been caused by arson (and that a "suspect" was taken into custody), the runes cut into the belly of Ada Nedifar suggest that her death was anticipated, and that she was attempting some kind of magic involving her unborn daughter.
- Shout-Out: While searching online for information about black mirrors used in the occult, the search engine Kobe uses suggests Black Mirror.
- Techno Witch: Marina uses the screen of her laptop — on which she films her own suicide — as a black scrying mirror. This allows her soul to travel via electronic devices and manipulate them directly, including emerging from the black screens of powered-down devices, hacking Laura's Facebook page, sending calls and text messages, hacking security cameras, and even possessing someone through a heart monitor.
- Thanatos Gambit: Marina commits suicide in a dark ritual, unleashing her true magical potential and transforming into a powerful, demonic entity.
- Vengeful Ghost: Marina becomes something akin to this (though she's closer to a demon than a true human ghost).
- What You Are in the Dark: As everyone in Laura's friend group becomes fully aware that there's a curse coming after them, they all try various ways to avert their fate. Seeing that the trigger for each person's death is Marina adding them on her friend list, Olivia and Tyler try to delete their accounts, only to no avail. Kobe, however, also tries unfriending Laura as an attempt to get out of the curse, also to no success.
- Wicked Wasps: As a child, Marina summoned wasps to fatally sting her tormentors. She retains the ability as a spirit, (with the wasps actually contained inside her body) and uses it to attack and kill Laura's friends. According to Kobe's research, this is because wasps are traditionally associated with witchcraft.
- Woman Scorned: After Marina spends two weeks working on a portrait of Laura for her birthday, Laura lies and tells her that her birthday celebration was cancelled (to avoid having to invite her). When the lie is exposed, Marina takes her own life in a magic ritual, returning as a vengeful spirit hell-bent on ruining Laura's life.
- Would Hurt a Child: When Marina was a little girl, she killed two boys who were bullying her relentlessly by having her wasps sting them to death.