The Friendship Game

Four friends (Cotton, played by Kaitlyn Santa Juana; Courtney, played by Kelcey Mawema; Zooza, played by Peyton List; and Rob with the bad hair, played by Brendan Meyer) on their last summer together before college takes them apart spend an afternoon with a strange device found at a haunted yard sale, described by a creepy old hippie as a friendship game. The device bears an obvious similarity to the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser. The rules are simple: place your fingers on the device and state your truest, deepest wish. If your friendships survive, so do you.

And if they don’t, well, things can get ugly.

On the surface, this is Hellraiser by way of urban legend teen horror like Final Destination. It carries some surprises, but mostly fits the formula, which is not a bad thing. People love those movies for a reason! Under the surface, though, one feels like it is trying too hard to be deep, and winds up disjointed and confusing. Maybe. Or maybe it is deep and I’m missing an essential part.

Their fondest wishes aren’t particularly unexpected: to get into college, to be good at sex, and so on. The rules of the game are a little unclear. The local pervert Kyle (Dylan Schombing) is pulled in for no discernible reason except he was an electronic peeping Tom watching the game from Cotton’s webcam. Some of them have weird flashback experiences, and their experiences sometimes don’t match, in what I think is some sort of alternate-world nonsense, and everyone seems to be punished whether they were truthful in the game or not.

The device is neat looking, the parts are reasonably well-acted, and it moves okay, but the script is just a mess. Even as a typical slasher it falls short, and as a meaningful meditation on the nature of reality it falls WAY short. Who is this for? The death and the sex are really tame, but it’s a bit too weird for tween horror (and don’t get me wrong, I LOVE weird. But David Lynch this ain’t).

It also tries a bit too hard to be hip. Would any contemporary teen still say “Barf Dot Com”? It tries too hard and dates itself before it’s even born.

I don’t know, I feel like I may not be playing fair. It’s in the family of Urban Legends and Final Destination, popcorn teen horror, and it’s inoffensive as such. No one in it is terrible (apart from Rob’s hairdresser), and the surface-level story, while predictable, is serviceable. I just think it’s trying for a depth it’s ill-equipped to deliver.

Maybe there was meddling, and parts are missing that would have pulled it all together. I hope if so, the director’s cut eventually gets released, because it actually has promise.

I give this film