Of course the funniest film of the year is about how hard it is now to make a friend. We’re living in the age of social decay. Either you’re parasocially attached to ChatGPT or starting fist fights at the cinema because half a row’s been temporarily blinded by the glow of someone checking their likes on Instagram. No one knows how to socialise anymore and everyone’s angry at each other for it.
Writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s debut feature, Friendship, files all those anxieties into a lethally absurd point, summarised by its exasperated lead Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) when he cries out: “I did one strange thing and I’m toast!” An erroneously delivered package has led him to the front door of his new neighbour, the moustachioed, twinkly eyed glory that is Paul Rudd’s Austin Carmichael. Austin collects Palaeolithic artefacts, plays in a band, does weather for the local news station, and doesn’t even own a phone. He might very well be the ultimate man.
Craig’s wife, Tami (Kate Mara), is 12 months cancer free. It’s created an urgency in Craig that feels like watching a wheel spinning in mud – some ghost of the post-lockdown frustration of wanting to finally embrace life with no means or knowledge to do it. “You’re healthy and we’re here now,” he urges her. That could have been a beautiful sentiment if he hadn’t been begging her to explore a sewer system with him. Nothing makes sense: why he can never fill his coffee cup to the right level, why his wife and teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer) kiss on the lips, why he’s the only one to take the free biscuits at the counselling meeting.
But then, Austin – cool, casual Austin – tells him: “You crack me up.” You can practically hear the angelic choirs as Craig’s face lights up. It’s perfect and beautiful, until Craig does the “one strange thing”, and suddenly his entire life spirals out of control because he can’t handle the blowback. The “strange thing” is an incredible punchline – entirely unexpected and absurd yet underpinned by a horrible logic that quietly suggests to the audience why Craig is the way he is. And it’s one of several incredible punchlines, among them one of the funniest drug trips ever put to screen.
Craig is loathsome and empathetic in equal measure because – and DeYoung is smart to do this – while he may be weird, so is everyone else. It’s just that there are invisible rules out there about what weirdness is socially acceptable and what isn’t. The director, who’s worked on shows like Pen15 and Our Flag Means Death, has his own sensibility. Both here and in his excellent 2019 short Rachel, about a woman at a house party where the guests slowly discover none of them know her, he speaks fluently in the language of horror. In Friendship, it’s all slow zooms, harsh cuts, and the synth groans of Keegan DeWitt’s score.
But he also wrote the film specifically for Robinson, and Craig feels like a feature-length extension of his Netflix series I Think You Should Leave, whose sketches mostly operate around someone misreading a social situation and, instead of quietly retreating, having an aggressively public breakdown. And Robinson, really, is a genius at all this – the way he extends his “f***”s like he’s watching the fabric of the universe collapse around him, or how his smile can both burn with frightening intensity or the fragility of a lost little child. There are few better at capturing the existential terror of having to talk to other people and then making us laugh about it. He might be a clown, but he’s our clown.
Dir: Andrew DeYoung. Starring: Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer. Cert 15, 101 minutes.
‘Friendship’ is in cinemas from 18 July
