Anxiety, for the many people that experience it, is a disorder that is hard to explain let alone capture on film. In a thriller, the audience can be put on the edge of their seats with stressful situations and high stakes, but anxiety is a different beast entirely. It is a boiling below the surface fear that can be silent at first and slowly becomes an unbearable force that just engulfs those struggling to keep it together. All My Friends Hate Me perfectly encapsulates the crushing pressure of anxiety, the fear of living up to someone you used to be, and the paranoia that your friends secretly hate you.

After years of crafting a new relationship with his girlfriend, and hopefully soon to be fiance, Pete receives an invitation to celebrate his birthday with his old best friends. Full of hopes of reliving the crazy times that they spent together at university, he is confused to arrive at his friend’s mansion and find no one there. After arriving hours later the friends chalk it up to a simple misunderstanding and assure the rest of the weekend will go off without a hitch. That sounds good to Pete until he notices that they have brought a stranger home from the pub and he is the life of the party. What starts as a strange introduction to Harry the weekend falls down a rabbit hole of strange events, the past being drudged up, and Pete having to ask himself do all my friends hate me?

The power of All My Friends Hate Me comes from its understanding of the feeling of anxiety, and to a greater extent, how it can drive paranoia. It is perfectly understandable for someone to feel shy reuniting with friends after a long period of time without communication but it is anxiety that makes someone question if their friends are starting to dislike them through subtle misunderstandings. Add in the unexpected guest and these misunderstandings start to feel more like a plot against you as the anxiety drives the paranoia. It is in these moments that the film gives the audience a drowning sensation with how tense things get as the mystery builds in unexpected ways.

Where the film hits bumps that keep it from being great is when the characters’ reactions to events feel unreasonable or manufactured to fit the paranoia theme. There are a lot of moments where characters seem to act completely unreasonable to Pete and treat him miserably during his birthday weekend nonetheless. All My Friends Hate Me deals with many possible moments of gaslighting but when they feel so forced it breaks the suspension of disbelief.

It is hard to recommend an uncomfortable experience, no matter what it is about. All My Friends Hate Me is full of funny moments that are buried by pure anxiety-driven dread, the kind of stress that only comes from self-doubt and paranoia. It is well worth a watch and takes an uncommon genre, the lesser-seen stress fueled thriller, to the next level.

7 out of 10