In hopeful anticipation of it being more widely available on platforms in the foreseeable future, All My Friends Hate Me may be the strangest, most uncomfortable movie you watch this year, in a good way. Written by newcomers Tom Stourton and Tom Palmer, All My Friends Hate Me played at Tribeca this year and was released back in March. Perhaps this movie will set off a chain reaction of events in cinema and the real world.
Directed by Andrew Gaynord, All My Friends Hate Me stars the movie’s writer Tom Stourton as Pete, a man passionate about his charity work with refugees, excited to spend the weekend of his 31st birthday with the old college friends who he hasn’t seen in a while. Once they have all reunited under the same roof, what follows is a gradual unraveling of the peace as dark truths, abuses, and cringe-worthy social awkwardness and peer pressure.
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This movie’s most awfully relatable social anxiety spirals into surreal horror and savage roasting, with debatable results. All My Friends Hate Me is very well directed, with great use of reflections, mirrors, wide shots, and composition to lend an eerie, suspicious feel to every exchange. Let’s break this movie down and unpack what it can do for other writers, filmmakers, and audiences who manage to make it to the end of the harrowing, nerve-wracking, hair-pulling 90-or-so minutes.
The Set-Up in All My Friends Hate Me
Totally Tom Films
Pete is on his way to reunite with George, the owner of the vacation house, Fig, George’s wife, Archie, and Claire, who Pete had a fling with before he left the country to begin his work with refugees. Pete’s girlfriend Sonia will be joining them in a day, so Pete makes the trek out himself. He has odd encounters with strange men, abused dogs, and beat-up old cars.
When he finally finds the house, none of his friends are there to greet him. He waits for them well into the night, never seeing the note they left explaining they went to the local pub. Once they return, Pete finds that they made a new friend named Harry, who immediately sets Pete’s teeth on edge.
The rest of the movie proceeds with the most awkward social interactions you’ve seen on the screen. Everything that Pete says, his friends cringe at. Every joke he tells falls flat. He doesn’t do any of the things they want him to, like down his drink or remember old details about the past. Every story he tells backfires on him in the most embarrassing ways, and it finally gets so bad that Fig confronts him when they are alone on the stairs and tells him that “he’s not doing very well” socially.
A mortified Pete retreats to his bedroom, only to find that Harry will be sharing the room with him. Harry takes notes after everything Pete says, purposefully antagonizing him by scooping his jokes, making excuses for him, and openly mocking him. Harry is giving every appearance of taking Pete’s place in the friend group as the partying, fun guy, much to Pete’s dismay.
Pete also learns that Claire had a bad bout with depression after their break-up and left the manor early the following day after discovering someone must have told her – as Pete only told George in confidence – that Pete would be proposing to Sonia soon, making Pete feel terrible. Everything Pete’s friends try to do to celebrate his birthday turns into an awkward disaster or a fight, and worst of all, Pete can’t seem to shake the feeling that everyone knows something he doesn’t, and everyone is out to get him.
It only gets worse for Pete mentally. He starts to suspect that someone is tampering with his soothing herbal pills, becomes overwhelmed by insecurity, and can’t stop asking himself, who is this guy, Harry, and why is everyone so mean?
Do All Pete’s Friends Actually Hate Him?
The twist of the movie is shocking. Do all Pete’s friends hate him or is it all in his head? Does Pete just need to find better, less malevolent company, or is this merely a problem of perception and self-absorption? Without giving away any spoilers, this movie is ultimately about acceptance as much as social anxiety. The film isn’t about grand conspiracies or wrongdoings. It’s about everybody having approximately the same amounts of trauma, embarrassment, and insecurity as everybody else.
We are all prone to misunderstandings, suspicion, self-interest, and hostility, particularly when we are at our most vulnerable and sense someone isn’t telling us the truth or are destabilized by withholding information from a loved one that, we fear, might change the way they feel about us.
At the end of the day, this is an unnervingly, hysterically human script with brilliant artistry and meaning. We hope to see more films that tap into the interpersonal and psychic crisis that is the millennial experience. More specifically, we hope to see more work from Tom Stourton, Tom Palmer, and Andrew Gaynord. This trio slammed the market with quite the breakout feature, and we hope it starts a new wave of recognition amongst its viewers.
Almost everything is a perception problem, while almost nothing is a question of right or wrong. Pete’s ultimate problem is not, as the movie says, that he can’t take a joke, but that he just can’t see that we all, at one time or another, ask ourselves the crucial question, do all my friends hate me?
