Friend Request review: a stupid, irresponsible, immoral Facebook shocker

This militantly appalling horror film offers so much to complain about that it hardly seems worth taking offence at its interpersonal politics, but we have to start kicking somewhere. This seems as weak a spot as any.

Friend Request is the latest shocker to submerge itself in the world of social media. In its opening sections, the picture looks as if it might have something commendable to say about social bigotry.

Alycia Debnam-Carey plays the most popular girl in school (and the most likely person to become the “Final Girl” of horror film lore). Like her friends at college, she spends hours of her day weeding and replanting her Facebook page. Life changes when she encounters a lonely, dark-haired girl named Marina (Liesl Ahlers).

The newcomer is everything the “popular kids” abhor: socially awkward, perennially miserable, unashamedly needy. Worst of all, she has no “friends” on her Facebook account. Initially, the film seems sympathetic to Marina, but it rapidly moves on to colour her with all the negative stereotypes applied to emo sub-cultures. She is depressive, deranged, malign and ultimately suicidal.

Last year's infinitely more imaginative Unfriended was very much on the side of its victim. Though not everyone who subsequently perished deserved their fate, we guiltily cheered the bully's revenge from beyond the grave.

Simon Verhoeven’s stupid, irresponsible film offers implicit sympathy to all those holding Goth kids’ heads downs the lavatory.

The moral infelicities would be forgivable if the film echoed some of Unfriended's inventive subversions of new media. The current film-makers do little more than point their boring camera at the boring computer screen. The actors seem barely awake. The jump-shocks are dropped in randomly with no narrative justification. Cape Town delivers a stunningly unconvincing performance as Somewhere-or-Other, California.

Did I leave anything out?