All My Friends Hate Me

The title of writer/​director Andrew Gaynord’s fea­ture debut is a tad deceiv­ing. Not all of Pete’s (Tom Stour­ton) friends hate him, but the uni mates who gath­er for his 31^st birth­day cer­tain­ly appear indif­fer­ent to him. Such is the way with reunions – get­ting the old gang back togeth­er often mere­ly serves to high­light how lit­tle you had in com­mon in the first place.

Pete’s posh chums aren’t his pri­ma­ry cause for con­cern, though. His already bruised ego takes a fur­ther hit when a local inter­lop­er named Har­ry (Dustin Dem­ri-Burns) estab­lish­es him­self as the life and soul of the par­ty. What should have been a boozy cel­e­bra­tion takes on an awk­ward air, and worse still, Pete has rea­son to sus­pect this ran­dom gate­crash­er may not be as harm­less as he seems.

Set in a fusty coun­try pile some­where in Devon, the film ini­tial­ly sets out its stall as an upper-mid­dle class satire. Gaynord’s real inten­tions are only revealed when the film piv­ots into psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror ter­ri­to­ry around the halfway mark. With Pete and Har­ry iso­lat­ed from the rest of the group, the for­mer takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­front his would-be adver­sary. But is there real­ly some­thing sin­is­ter going on, or is Pete’s para­noia (as the title alludes) sim­ply get­ting the bet­ter of him?

The film keeps us guess­ing to the end, although a lack of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and some pon­der­ous plot­ting means it’s hard to care too much about the fate of Pete and the oth­ers. To his cred­it, Gaynord nails the cringe­wor­thy social rit­u­als that char­ac­terise a par­tic­u­lar type of Eng­lish priv­i­lege. But Ben Wheat­ley he is not.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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