All My Friends Hate Me (2021)

I saw the title and thought “How could I not want to watch this?” I saw the title and also thought “How can I watch that?”. The last time I watched a film with that kind of logic, it was the very interesting My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday (2016) so maybe it was worth a punt.

Although I have not been posting many blogs on films over the last few years )the last one I posted was for Joker (2019), not including the 3WRs of Ghibli Club) I have still been watching films and the whole industry has changed in that time. So many films released since 2020 have been at the cinema for very short times and this particular film was part of the BFI streaming service when I first heard of it. I saw the title and added it to my list but I did not think I wanted to watch it without being ready. I could not tell what it was - it was marked as comedy.

The setup of All My Friends Hate Me (2021) is relatively slight, starting with the main character, Pete, chatting away with his girlfriend, Sonia, about a party he is going to. Rather oddly, the party is for him and held by his old friends in a big Country House for his 31st birthday. She is going to join them later but she has never met these friends and so is asking about them. Why has she never met them? In many ways, the point of the film is basically that. Passing beyond thirty^[1] is an interesting point in life - people are supposed to feel a bit grown-up but maybe they are not. Maybe people’s careers are heating up and you are becoming, potentially, further apart from the friends you made when you had no money. When you had to get by on the strength of your personality^[2]. But as you move on with your careers, different aspects of your personality and also the people you are mixing with can change quite a bit.

The location of the country house is because the party is being thrown by someone that owns a big country house - well, maybe not yet butinherit a big country house. And that is another key element of the film, this is a friend group of posh, rich people and that does include the protagonist too. From an artistic perspective, the isolated big mansion is a pretty good setup for horror and enables the director to set the scene with some nice, rural, rolling vistas.

When Pete gets to the mansion, his friends are not there and he wonders where they are and whether it was all an elaborate joke. Do all of his friends hate him?

As setups go, I thought this was pretty good and it set the scene well of the awkwardness of seeing people again for the first time in a while. The friends here, as close as they were, have not actually seen Pete for a while and that is because of Pete’s work - charity work, taking him away. This deals, somewhat deftly, with the idea of reverse culture shock which is where something that was familiar turns out to be alien. That is most commonly understood for people that go away from home and come back to find that they have changed but home has not. I don’t think this is actually quite accurate (in my experience, anyway) as what often happens is that you have changed and home has changed but you expected home, rather selfishly, to stay unchanged. Life moves on. And that is true of friendships too.

The rest of the film winds through the weekend with the feeling of paranoia consistently worming its way through Pete all weekend as they work through Posh Birthday Activities until, eventually, it comes to some form of conclusion. In many ways, the narrative (which I am not going to cover anyway in a review) is not as important as that feeling of awkwardness and isolation which is well captured.

I found this an oddly thought-provoking film and not necessarily what I was expecting. As the perspective is all from Pete, I do not think it is necessarily factual - and many of the awkward moments may just have felt awkward and so been presented as such. It also really works within the fairly common form of British friendship where you just don’t say many nice things to those you are close friends with. These types of relationships can really gnaw away at those that don’t have the confidence to carry them through or just don’t have the obliviousness needed sometimes. And I think everyone can be prone to lapses in confidence every so often. In that sense, I think the film is probably capturing a fairly common feeling (in the UK, at least) and one which a lot of people will enjoy squirming through. That is especially for anyone that has ever wondered whether their friends like them or not. And if you haven't wondered that, I have some news for you: Your friends have all got a WhatsApp group without you in it. 

You can watch this film on BFI https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-all-my-friends-hate-me-2022-online

And I am sure at many other places too.

<sup>1. Obligatory Fight Club reference: I can't get married, I'm a 30 year old boy↩
2. One of the things I found most disappointing, and dispiriting, in my own university years was the complete lack of personality. I felt (and maybe I was just out of place) that quite a lot of people had drinks in lieu of a personality. This still seems true when older and there is a trope of women having “gin” instead of a personality. Or Beer Guys.↩</sup>