All My Friends Hate Me
This is a dark millennial nightmare comedy-of-cruelty. Its premise being, ‘If you can’t spot the asshole in any group of five people, the asshole is you!’ Behind me a girl wanders into BFI NFT2 gleefully telling the usher, “It’s my fifth visit!” So is she ‘a one in five’? If you take the maxim that movies address an audience then this film’s trailer doesn’t sidestep the type of people you’re about to spend the next 94 minutes with. If you warm to, or are amused by such ‘types’, does this mean that you’re one of them?
Pete, who is just back from helping refugees ‘abroad’, is played by the screenplay’s co-author the stand-up comedian Tom Stourton. Birthday boy Pete drives to a Mansion House for a University reunion of upper crust narcissists who haven’t gathered in a decade. The location is Devon where the lie to the cliché is touted, that, ‘If you’re truly good mates, you just pick up from where you left off’. Except Pete doesn’t.
Pete falls victim to the prankster-loving classes. He becomes quite paranoid as jokes aimed at his expense become increasingly more vindictive. A take on Johnson’s Bullingdon types, the film superficially recalls the luvvies in Kenneth Brannagh’s ‘Peter’s Friends’. A nearer cousin is Danny Boyle’s debut ‘Shallow Grave’. There too the cast were deeply irritating and obnoxious. Here, however, there isn’t one sympathetic character apart from Peter’s late-to-the-party girlfriend who surmises that Peter doesn’t ‘get jokes’. Oh dear. Therein the point of the whole film.
A far better reunion movie was Ben Wheatly’s ‘Down Terrace’. If Wheatley had adapted this script he’d have killed them all off. Thereby doing us all a bloody favour. ‘All My Friends Hate Me’ is a BFI theatrical release available on BFI Player.
