If we have been able to see something in recent years, it is films about various reunions where old friends gather and these gatherings turn into a complete disaster. This British combination of black humor satire and psychological thriller more than horror directed by Andrew Gaynord will follow a similar path. One of the screenwriters, Tom Stourton, played the main protagonist Pete, for whom the former team from the faculty organized a celebration of the 31st birthday. Pete has just returned from volunteering at a refugee camp, and a day later his fiancée Sonia will arrive at a typical British provincial estate with a villa to meet his old company.
And he starts “All My Friends Hate Me” almost like a classic horror movie because he gets lost on the way, he is attacked by a homeless man who sleeps in a crumb, and when his navigation crumbles, he asks a guy who looks like the grandfather of the “Straw Dogs” team. But he somehow arrives at a villa owned by his best friend George (Joshua McGuire), and there’s his wife Fig (Georgina Campbell), already drugged Archie (Graham Dickson) and Pete’s ex-Claire (Antonia Clarke). There’s also Harry, a slightly older guy the team picked up earlier at a local pub and he acts like a classic jerk, but to the tense and nervous Pete it will seem like a stranger has taken him for a pick for some reason and is constantly provoking him.
To sense that everyone except Pete was at least some upper middle class while he was somehow always an outsider on the subject and seemed to feel he needed to prove himself more. Time has also taken its toll, so that youthful closeness has disappeared, and Pete will become more and more paranoid and insecure, and it will seem to him that the team he hasn’t seen in years has decided to replace him with a new member, Harry. And until the end, it’s not clear to us if it’s all in Pete’s head or if everyone, led by Harry, is perfidiously brainstorming him, and by the end, “All My Friends Hate Me” turned out to be a solid movie.
It’s an interesting psychothriller – a satire on friendship and how the passage of time can affect relationships between people and how some relationships can simply break down without us even being aware of it. And although it is clear that Pete was once a member of this team, he seems to be the only one who has changed, created a completely new image and seems to be ashamed of the person he once was, and his college friends know this very well. He can’t relax, especially since the girl he plans to marry is coming and he is terrified to find out what he was like in his young days when he tried his best to prove himself to a rich and privileged team from a prestigious faculty. Stylistically and thematically, “All My Friends Hate Me” reminded me a bit of similar Ben Wheatley films that used to seem equally uncomfortable.
MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: MY SON (2021, GBR) Movie review, plot, trailer, rating