A first feature for director Andrew Gaynord, the British black comedy All My Friends Hate Me stars co-writer Tom Stourton as Pete, a 30-something Londonite who sets out for the countryside for a reunion and birthday celebration with his mates from university. Eager to relive his imagined past as "Skippy," the captain of the party boat, he arrives at his friend George's posh family estate to find no one else around. Disappointed and offended, he waits well into the evening for them to come back. When they do return, he's met with surprise by Archie (Graham Dickson), the seemingly always inebriated party animal of the group. Archie tells him that George (Joshua McGuire) had only sent the invitation as a joke. Nobody wants him there.
This turns out to be just a bit of cheap ribbing. Archie, George, his wife Fig (Georgina Campbell), and Pete's ex-lover Claire (Antonia Clarke), are all ecstatic to see him after so many years. When he implies that they left him behind, they point out that they left a note for him of where to join them, one that he had completely missed.
And, then, there's Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), a local that the group met at the pub while Pete was left all alone. Pete is immediately jealous of the attention Harry receives despite his presumptuous familiarity with his friends. He's also suspicious. Whenever he finds himself in a situation where he reacts poorly or puts his foot in his mouth, he notices the eccentric Harry whipping out a notepad and writing something down. Harry doesn't seem to mind that Pete notices these things either, making frequently wry, needling, overly personal observations. Pete swears he recognizes Harry, but can't place him. They are forced to share the same bedroom, and Pete suspects Harry when he finds that the medication he uses to treat his generalized anxiety disorder has gone missing. Eager to introduce his friends to his new girlfriend Sonia (Charly Clive), arriving shortly but running late, he is also hesitant about revealing his intention to propose to her around Claire, to whom he is still attracted, and who went through a period of suicidal depression shortly after their breakup. When Claire finds out anyway, his friends chastise him, assuming he thoughtlessly "rubbed it in her face" that he had moved on. Of course, Pete concludes that Harry must have been the one who told her.
Slowly but surely, what should have been a weekend to rekindle old ties turns into a private hell. Pete feels himself being frozen out of his friend group, made the butt of jokes at his expense, blamed for circumstances beyond his control, and convinced that Harry, the outsider, is conspiring to turn everyone against him... or torture him psychologically... or worse.
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There's little secret to fans of horror, and increasingly less so in our popular culture more broadly, that gasps of revulsion are inextricably linked to guffaws of laughter. During the golden age of drive-in double-features in the mid-'50s, producers like James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff established a formula that took it for granted that horror shows should not take themselves too seriously. Taking queue from the Universal monster rallies of the previous decade, they produced films that announced themselves right off as bombastic offerings of the macabre, with an implicit understanding of a uniquely evolving audience of juvenile horror fans who were coming just as much to thrill at the ghouls and gore as they were to laugh at the objectively ridiculous, and often technically incompetent proceedings. By the '80s, filmmakers like Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna, John Landis, and especially Joe Dante might have offered a higher pedigree of production value, but their films were nonetheless steeped in nostalgia for not only the visceral gratuity, but also the hammy, scene-chewing oratory of the '50s "B" horror movie. In contrast to the more emotionally intensive and subtle terror films of the New Hollywood, the horror films of the '80s went over-the-top for the hell of it, making very little secret that the frights were for the normies, whereas the inner circle of horror's occult fanbase were there primarily for the gallows humor of it all. The nostalgia and gratuity of the period became symptomatically reflected in the horror film itself, as it entered a new phase of postmodernity and self-awareness, the horror film as black comedy.
At the same time, however, this postmodern tendency of horror also liberated the observational eye of the humorist, now turned towards the period's decadence, ritual consumption, and increasing social alienation. Whereas moral crusaders took their shots at the slasher film, the horror filmmakers adopted a slobs-versus-snobs stance against the generalized status quo. Be it Larry Cohen's The Stuff, John Carpenter's They Live, Brian Yuzna's Society, or Joe Dante's The 'Burbs, horror films were paradoxically using juvenile packaging to invoke social commentary and satire. Indeed, horror filmmakers and horror fans were veritably re-writing the history of horror itself, at least as far as pretenses of anti-establishment subversion could be made more accessible to the popcorn gallery on a Halloween night. The cutting edge of horror had always been tinged with a crimson, ghoulish glee, don't you know? Roger Corman and William Castle knew exactly what they were doing when they cast Vincent Price. Since James Whale, the horror show had always been aware of itself, subversive, and, what's more, quite funny. And via its basis in what we fear, that which fills us with dread, it taps into the most primal and essential character of what it is to be human. It is the most unalloyed reflection of who and what we are.
Within the last decade or so, one notices that the more blatantly satirical trajectory of horror - the normalization of horror as an explicit, rather than coded confrontation with the foibles, dysfunctions, and crises of the contemporary world - has been rewarded by a reciprocal interest of established comedians and comic writers in making horror movies. Quite frankly, a lot of comedy nowadays is so abstract in its aims, so schizophrenic and "metamodern" in its aesthetic, that it can achieve the kind of visceral repulsion and existential dread that one might call downright horrific. And there is a new generation of low-budget and independent film auteurs who either have their roots in the mediums of sketch comedy, stand-up, viral and cringe humor, or take cue from their antecedents in Landis and Dante by straddling an increasingly blurry line, one foot each planted firmly in two neighboring genres.
Gaynord is the latest, most visible filmmaker to represent this tendency of new dark comedy. Having been active in British television since 2012, he's already got a substantial list of sketch comedy and cringe-humor credits behind him. The most notable of these are his collaborations with Phil Burgers in adapting the latter's "Dr. Brown" character to British television, as well as his directing the third series of Jamie Demetriou's Stath Lets Flats, which was picked up by HBO Max last year. Stourton featured prominently in both of these projects as well, and All My Friends Hate Me serves as his and fellow actor Tom Palmer's first foray into feature film writing.
Fundamentally a collaborative effort, All My Friends Hate Me is not merely exemplary of a certain kind of comedy or horror film. With regards to how both genres have evolved and synthesized in the 21st century, Gaynord, Stourton, and Palmer's film is, quite simply, exemplary of the duality of horror and comedy itself, presented in a slick, consummate, and impressive fashion. All My Friends Hate Me is certainly a comedy-horror of a definitive kind, of an identifiable film cycle. But unlike its antecedents in this cycle, the thing that is remarkable about it is how it achieves both horror and comedy through the most atmospheric and situational of means, rather than with much of anything that we might generically associate with what a horror film must have, be it maniacs, witchcraft, mad science, or extensive and ingenious methods of butchery and torture.
This, in turn, reflects upon the trio's greater clarity of purpose in crafting a visceral experience, where we cringe from a strange mixture of comic amusement at the poor Pete's expense, while also cringing in discomfort at the identifiability of his predicament. Who hasn't felt like Pete? Who hasn't felt like we always end up wanting and needing our friends - or any friends at all - far more than they need, much less want us? I can certainly vouch for feeling like the fifth wheel pretty much all of my college life, and there's little doubt that this is one of the overarching fears and neurotic preoccupations of my generation. There is an extent to which that being left out of an evening on the town can feel more like abandonment than just a non-ideal weekend circumstance. Sometimes a friendly roast just goes too far, as if coded to express true feelings of hatred. But what makes it all worse - and the aspect that makes All My Friends Hate Me that much more viscerally true to life, to the extent that it almost makes the film repulsively unenjoyable - is when we realize that we're the ones being the asshole. We're the ones not paying attention. We're the ones getting stuck in our heads and inventing details in a solipsistic universe that has no baring on anyone else's subjective experience. In the end, we're the ones not keeping in touch, not letting people in, not following up, not treating them the way we would like to be treated. In other words, we act like the world revolves around us.
Sometimes our friends are cruel. Sometimes our friends are assholes. Sometimes our friends are going through the same exact stuff that we are, and end up doing exactly the same thing that we would do if the roles were reversed. The problem is that we are often more preoccupied with being liked and accepted for who we are, in such vague and abstract terms, rather than with accepting or tolerating others. The conspiracy becomes a convenient framework for eliding, not the occult reality of our preternaturally hateful selves, but rather our inability to simply enjoy being around our friends. There's a thin line, of course, between self-hatred and self-obsession.
That's the essential kernel of both cringe humor and existential horror that undergirds All My Friends Hate Me. It's also the aspect that makes it additionally exemplary in terms of the cycle of films of which it is a part. Besides the greater clarity of purpose from a visceral perspective, there is also a greater maturity to the writing and craft of the film.
The most obvious antecedent for Gaynord, Stourton, and Palmer's project is the 2017 film Get Out, written and directed by Jordan Peele. Another product of a sketch comedy veteran who transitioned into genre cinema, Get Out is about a black photographer named Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) who takes a road trip with his white girlfriend from his hometown of Brooklyn to upstate New York in order to meet her wealthy parents. Slowly but surely, Chris discovers that he's the latest victim of a strange, secret society that lures, ensnares, and brainwashes black men so that their brains can be cut out and replaced by those of old white people. A none too subtle satire of the ways in which white liberals perpetuate systemic racism under the guise of social progress, and a definitive example of the kind of borderline, middlebrow arthouse horror movie that has succeeded the tradition of postmodern '80s, Get Out is certainly not without its own antecedents. Frequently cited for comparison is Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives and its 1975 film adaptation, though Peele himself was more apt to refer to Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, another adaptation of a Levin novel, also about a secret society attempting to control or replace a woman's body just as the cult of Get Out attempt to control and replace black people. But the themes of Get Out also proved to be culturally and historically contingent, part of a cycle of horror films that reflect upon the heightened state of paranoia and distrust with conventional authority during a time of growing wealth inequality, and generalized anxiety over questions of personal security and liberty. Get Out may be more specialized in terms of its focus on race, but it is nonetheless inextricable from a cycle of paranoiac films where the prevailing source of suspicion and terror is inscrutable wealth, manifested in clandestine organizations of the elites who prey upon the desperate and ignored. And whether it's Get Out, the Purge franchise produced by Blumhouse (who also produced Get Out), Escape Room and its sequel, Ready or Not, The Hunt, and now All My Friends Hate Me, the big Other in these paranoiac films are rarely if ever predominately motivated by material interests. Like the cabalistic elders of Zion, like the Satanic orders of Freemasonry, like all the child-eating witches who crowd the elite halls of the academy and Hollywood and the federal government in the Qanon mythos, the conspiracies of these films are mystical in nature, the product of base and degenerate obsession with sex and blood, the extreme limits of power and evil for its own sake.
Even though Get Out is about the omnipresent racism of a white liberal status quo, it is also just as much about the generalized anxiety of its time, and the paranoia that makes the shadowy cabal such a salient and problematic metaphor. It is inflected both by Peele's passionate layering (and mixing) of metaphors related to aspects of the black experience and representation in popular culture, as well as by what most paranoiac films lack, which is an observational comedian's careful attention to how certain social situations produce unique forms of paranoia and anxiety that, in turn, reflect back on patterns in our collective pathology that are often quite fantastic, exaggerated, and narcissistic in nature. Whereas another black character in the film's opening played by LaKeith Stanfield is simply knocked over the head and thrown into the trunk of a car, the elaborate system by which Chris is seduced by his girlfriend, invited to the garden party, put through an elaborate process of being made to feel subconsciously inferior, this is all highly specific and done expressly for him, because of who he is, apart from being black, at some essential level. The threat is just as much to Chris's "unmanning" as anything else, the vampiric syphoning off of his essence in a conspiracy that nonetheless reinforces the fantasy of his own exceptionalism. In Lacanian terms, the reality of racism does not, so to speak, mean that Chris isn't being paranoid or neurotic, or that the fantasy of the secret society isn't in some way serving to deflect or rationalize something else.
The wires get crossed in Get Out. Ostensibly a progressive and empowering film, it is also deeply reflective of chauvinistic and reactionary patterns of myth-making in American life that bridge the conceptual divide between liberal progressive artists and Qanon yahoos. Those who lauded Get Out as one of the best films of 2017, one of the best films of the new millennium, one of the best films of the century, delighted in their own cringe humor by pointing out that the film was satirizing and poking fun at exactly the white liberal audience who embraced it. This, of course, completely misses the point. White liberal audiences embraced Get Out because its themes of generalized anxiety, paranoia, and a sense of one's own unique and essential persecution are themselves so legible to the experience of the white middle class in a time of precipitous social, economic, and political decline. And we know this is true because we see it everywhere in popular horror, in dystopian sci-fi and fantasy, in everything. So, yes, like the mad doctor cult of Get Out, white liberals, for whom paranoia is endemic, projected their minds into the imagined body of a black spectator, imagining a comparable physical and existential dread, because there is a profound desire in Western popular culture, dominated by the white imaginary, to confirm one's victimhood rather than one's complicity, to affirm one's individual exceptionalism rather than one's mediocrity, and to define the source of our terror as somehow located in some foreign and invisible corruption, rather than as stemming from our endemic phobia and self-obsession.
The same factors that led to Get Out being as beloved as it was will all but inevitably ensure that All My Friends Hate Me, just about the most essential film of the year so far, will get its tuppence of critical recognition before going down the memory hole. Gaynord, Stourton, and Palmer's film shares a basic narrative framework and a lot of themes with Get Out, to the extent that one could even argue that it functions as more or less a spiritual sequel, or even a remake. It's rather remarkable that more critics haven't specifically cited Peele's film as an obvious influence on All My Friends Hate Me, but, then again, perhaps this is just confirmation of how little Get Out is actually appreciated and how All My Friends Hate Me ends up just being a little too good for its own good, getting just a little too real for comfort. Nobody will be saying about All My Friends Hate Me, "Ha, wow, that movie really gave it to those (other) white liberals," even though Gaynord, Stourton, and Palmer's film is ultimately satirizing the same self-obsessed and privileged subject. As a veritable "white boy Get Out," it closes the circle on the vogue of paranoiac films, and consequently hits too close to home.
As with Chris in Get Out, Pete's journey begins in the city and takes him out into the countryside, ostensibly the guest of honor on some special occasion, in which the prospect of "taking the next step" with his present girlfriend is a major undercurrent. Though outwardly confident, it isn't long before a series of otherwise minuscule situations of social awkwardness and suggestions of hostility peel away at our hero to reveal the troubled man inside, feeling increasingly isolated, aggressed against, made to feel as though he is crazy or ungrateful, and anxious about his own safety. This will all culminate, of course, in a climactic outburst of retribution and anger, but the key difference here is not how All My Friends Hate Me subverts the conspiratorial formula of the paranoiac film at its climax. The cringe-inducing brilliance of Gaynord, Stourton, and Palmer's film comes out from the very beginning in terms of the filmmakers' willingness to portray Pete as a character who is empathetic, which is to say emotionally and psychologically relatable, through not sympathetic in the way that we often expect characters to be ideal victims. Whereas Chris might have been the perfect vehicle for the solipsistic imaginary of white liberals, Pete's personality is decidedly opaque, vacillating between an obviously compensatory, chauvinistic posture of social confidence and good intentions, and extreme defensiveness when that fantasy is punctured even slightly.
Indeed, Pete's personhood seems opaque even to himself, in a way that is identifiably structured around how he would like to be perceived and perceive himself rather than what is strictly accurate. He assures his girlfriend Sonia that George, Archie, and the rest are all pretty cool for "posh kids," and, yet, whereas it is his friend George who lets Harry in on their festivities, one of Pete's immediate instincts is to tell an exaggerated story about his encounter with a older local, caricaturing him as a crazy, dimwitted countryman. When Pete later takes exception to Archie's pejorative use of the slurs "pezo" and "pikey," Archie insists that he used to use the same words too in a past life, which Pete adamantly denies. The themes of class and ethnic divide are just as critical to All My Friends Hate Me as they are to Get Out, and it seems that Gaynord, Stourton, and Palmer have simply changed the vantage point on the terror, keeping it grounded, and teasing out its repulsive insinuations about the protagonist and a certain type of white liberal. Where it at first seems that Pete may have come from a working-class background, the lone exception in a gang of much more privileged posh friends, one realizes from the impressions that he's left in the minds of his friends that there probably wasn't that much difference in terms of their economic backgrounds and the "problematic" ways they used to define and amuse themselves before they all grew up and became, like Pete, so much more enlightened and progressive people. There is an aspect of denial here, Pete denying the extent of his privilege, either by over-emphasizing his friend's old money bloodlines or rationalizing it away with constant references to his personal virtue, such as the last summer he spent working in a refugee camp, which absolutely everybody has to hear about.
It is not so much that Pete only ever gets what's coming to him. He is often enough the victim of things beyond his control, and of his friends legitimately being unnecessarily cruel and opaque and judgmental in their own right. But the perspective of Gaynord's camera is so firmly pinned to Pete's subjective that we can't help but notice that he is at least self-aware enough to notice when he has done something wrong, when he has overlooked something, when he has misremembered a detail, when he just hasn't listened or shown authentic concern for what's going on in his friends' lives. And, yet, these moments of clarity all but immediately fall by the wayside. The obsession with being made to feel right, to feel vindicated, to have it confirmed that he is the abject and exceptional victim of some invisible and degenerate conspiracy is that powerful. This is, after all, not the vehicle for a paranoiac fantasy, but a thoroughly convincing depiction of a paranoiac subject, made all the more uncomfortable because of its apparent salience with regards to just how many people, especially the wealthy white subject, thinks and behaves in these times of increasing, generalized anxiety. Rather than a true, well-rounded and nuanced victim, Pete is simply a mediocre prat, identifiable for reasons that are made all the more uncomfortable because he knows he's kind of a prat, just like most of us do.
It is this self-awareness that is the most horrific, in the truest sense of the word: shocking and repulsive to us on a visceral level. It is also this self-awareness that is, after all, lacking from much of the contemporary cycle of the paranoiac films. Ostensibly carrying on the tradition of the postmodern horror satire, the current crop of class-clown writers of terror films rarely go for broke and really revel in the new vogue in what is gratuitous, which is the twisting of nerves by peeling back every layer of flimsy, defensive, self-obsessed fantasy that informs our own gratuitous times of decadence, ritual consumption, and social alienation. All My Friends Hate Me is one of the best horror films I've seen in a long time in terms of it inducing exactly what we take for granted as so hard to come by, which is a legitimate, uncomfortable, disturbing, skin-crawling horror, as opposed to just a particularly macabre form of slapstick humor. The fact that it is also so ingeniously funny, that it balances the paradox of horror and comedy so well, is the minimal balm that comes with its existentially brutal finale. Rather than bland paranoia, it offers its audience, especially a particular kind of spectator, something much more substantive in terms of its trenchant portrayal of a paranoiac mindset: A horror story so true to life, so good at eliciting horror, that you might find it impossible to enjoy.
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