‘The Friendship Game’ Review
Stars: Peyton List, Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Brendan Meyer, Kelcey Mawema, Dylan Schombing, Miriam Smith, Jennifer Copping | Written by Damien Ober | Directed by Scooter Corkle
Two girls, Cotton (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) and Zooza (Peyton List), are trawling a garage sale when an old woman approaches them to tell them about the strange object on the table – it’s a “friendship game”, one that will tell you who your real friends are. So, of course, they buy the freakish object and get their friends Courtney (Kelcey Mawema) and Rob (Brendan Meyer) to play along. The object of the game? To place your finger on the object and reveal your deepest desires to the object and the group…
Which would, in the hands of some directors, lead to some fantastical supernatural action as our protagonists’ desires come back to bite them in the arse. In fact, if I’m honest, I was expecting something akin to the under-seen Game of Death – which had a similar game-playing plot device but took things to more of an extreme. Here things play out in more a mysterious fashion as Cotton disappears one night after seeing her friends Zooza and Rob having sex and getting upset. So much for friends forever.
First things first. You know, without a shadow of a doubt, that any game played with a strange object is never going to lead to good things. So straight away the audience is put on the back foot, just waiting to see what happens to our protagonists. But the wait is, apart from the swift disappearance of Cotton, far too long. The Friendship Game drags, focusing more on the characters and their various hang-ups, but doing it in a way that means we’re just watching them go through the motions and not empathising with them in the slightest. Which doesn’t bode well when the four do get into danger.
The big issue is the films seeming lack of explanation. Early doors we see a teen sat at his computer hacking into numerous webcams across the globe – including Courtney’s – but his motivation isn’t explained at all, which means for the most part we just see a creepy stalker kid who’s into Italian horror (as the fake movie posters on his wall reveal)! Eventually more is revealed about Kyle, who it turns out is babysat by Zooza, and yet nothing’s really mentioned why he’s [sort of] integral to the film’s story… in the most superficial way possible. Plus, there’s waaaaay too many shots of Kyle just looking creepy without context and a shitty use of the character as some sort of conduit for the game in the denouement – which again is offered without explanation!
Then there’s what is CLEARLY an attempt to make this film about the multiverse, with characters seeing other versions of themselves, or being dragged into parallel universes and seeing glimpses of things they shouldn’t. That too is shown, at first, without explanation or even reasoning. Which is like most of this film – questions are never really fully answered and the audience is left to try and piece everything together, so much so that I questioned whether writer Damien Ober even knew the answers to how this game they’ve created works!
There’s even the question of Cotton’s disappearance – we get it, Cotton’s deepest desire was to stay friends with the group and not get “trapped” in the expectations of adulthood: college, marriage, etc. She wanted to escape that. However, escaping and disappearing are two totally different things… Eventually we discover, whether through the film’s shoddy script or by the audience’s sheer determination to figure out what’s going on, that Cotton’s disappearance is directly related to her deepest desire to keep the gang together – the other three’s wishes creating an alternate reality where Cotton cannot have her desire, therefore, the only option for her is to “disappear”. Courtney wants to get into college, which breaks up the friendship group; Rob wanted to be good in bed and ends up sleeping with all three girls, creating a divide between them; then there’s Zooza who, if her friends were leaving, didn’t want to be burdened with the memory of them like she is her father. Which means Cotton’s “wish” is once again unable to occur. Unless of course Cotton’s death and thus the loss of their friend keeps the group together…
It all feels very much like “we made it up on the spot” style of storytelling, where the film’s script was tweaked once too often and ended up making everything confusing. On the positive side though, if there’s one good thing in The Friendship Game it’s Peyton List. The Cobra Kai star brings that same intensity AND fragility to her role here as she does in the Netflix show and her character is at least the most fleshed out of the four protagonists – her character is the only one who really gets a deep-dive into her motivations (her abandonment issues following her father leaving).
In the end, if you want to watch a film that a) doesn’t provide answers; b) doesn’t even know the rules of its own game [or the answers to its own questions]; and c) doesn’t really make much sense, even by its own rules; the give The Friendship Game a go. Though you might be better served watching the likes of the aforementioned Game of Death and even Wish Upon, before tackling this game!
*½ 1.5/5
The Friendship Game is set for release on December 2nd.
