All My Friends Hate Me

One thing about getting older is the tendency to harp back with rose-tinted specs to school and university. Worse still if people who you only now know through Facebook feel the need to arrange some sort of reunion.

This isn’t quite the situation with Pete (Tom Stourton) who has been invited to celebrated his birthday with university friends and ex-girlfriend Claire (Antonia Clarke) at a friend’s country house.

Arriving at the pile, following an encounter with a hobo and a local Norman, he finds himself alone. That is until the owner Archie (Graham Dickson) and the rest turn up.

It’s all very awkward and gets worse when Pete tells them what he thinks is a funny, snobby story about his trip there only to see that Norman (Christopher Fairbank) is looking after them for the weekend which includes a shoot.

Adding to his sense of inadequacy is Harry (Dustin Demir-Burns) a gregarious local from the pub who is cramping what little style Pete has and taking the centre of attention away from the birthday boy. This all ratchets up as Pete starts to feel isolated among his friends. As they reminisce, his mind churns.

A childish prank leaves Harry and Pete walk to the pub for the party, giving the pair a chance to talk and Harry to prob. The party is a drugs and boozy affair, with the shoot the day after a dismal failure for Pete – not a bird. He’s mentally starting to suffer as the friends gather for the evening and Pete’s current girlfriend Sonia (Charly Clive) arrives.

This one long, awkward and bleak watch as the viewer witnesses Pete having to deal with the past and present with people that he probably no longer has much of a genuine rapport with if he ever really had any. There’s clearly meant to be a black comedy here but it is just black.

But it’s compulsive viewing seeing Pete falls apart towards a denouement that while done before is generally satisfactory. There are clues all along the film some more obvious than others though this isn’t a whodunnit in any sense.

Directed by Andrew Gaynord, co-written by Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton this is very middle to upper class in its setting, education and recreation, with a sniff of satire about it (some of the characters being stereotypes) though that heavy lifting falls squarely of Dickson’s shoulders and his nice-but-dim routine.

Though it’s unlikely to be film’s raison d’etre it will hopefully have an audience beyond the uni set as there are universal social issues such as depression, bullying and mental illness that affect all strata of society here.

The actors are all excellent with Stourton at the centre. Pete’s disintegration is a difficult watch and all credit to Stourton for a sympathetic and complex performance for a character that is actually difficult to like.