Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton made their names as the comedy double-act Totally Tom who went viral some years ago with their (very funny) creation High Renaissance Man, about clueless public schoolboys at uni, but their jointly scripted debut feature film, directed by Andrew Gaynord (from TV’s Stath Lets Flats) is a weirdly unrelaxed dark satire.
An entitled thirtysomething called Pete (played by Stourton) has spent some years abroad doing self-congratulatory “gap yah” charity work with refugees, but now wants to reconnect with his old gang from university, one of whom offers to host a huge birthday weekend for Pete at his colossal country estate. There Pete discovers, to his increasing paranoid dismay, that they all now seem to be giggling at him behind his back and that he is the punchline of a massive group joke that he does not understand. These upper-middle class chums of his have also invited a boozy, obnoxious local guy from the village called Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), whom Pete has never met and doesn’t like, but can’t find a polite way of disinviting.
It is an interesting premise, with what could be hints of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and Haneke’s Funny Games, and there is mileage in the quarterlife-crisis fear of unpopularity and losing what made you interesting in your teens and 20s. But this struck me as that kind of comedy horror in which (like much romantic comedy) the “comedy” half of the equation has gone missing. The funny stuff which we know that Stourton can do is jettisoned in favour of ordinary straight acting, and the plot’s big reveal feels anticlimactic and undeveloped, relating to what appear to be two separate guilty things in Pete’s past, neither of which has much impact. But I still hope that Stourton and Palmer can yet bring their High Renaissance Man comedy energy to films.
• All My Friends Hate Me is released on 10 June in cinemas.
