I had a horrible time, thank you so much.” These might not be the words a film’s creators dream of hearing from their fans – but it’s what Tom Stourton and Tom Palmer have been told about their exquisitely squirmy new movie, All My Friends Hate Me. And it feels like the only appropriate reaction. I’ve never enjoyed a film so much and yet felt so relieved when it was over. “It’s a hard thing to respond to,” says Stourton, laughing. “What do you say? ‘We’re really glad you enjoyed being made to feel awful?’” Palmer, who co-wrote the script with Stourton, is equally unapologetic. “We’ve got quite a high threshold for someone else’s suffering, so we find a lot of things funny that other people might find sad, I don’t know why…”
The man at the centre of the agony is Pete (Stourton), who’s off to spend his birthday weekend at his uni friend’s stately pile in the country. As his car crunches into the gravel drive, Darude’s “Sandstorm” blasting out of the sound system, Pete holds up a bottle of champagne and shouts: “It’s party time!” But unbeknown to him, his chums are all at the pub, and about to bring home a stranger and agent of chaos, Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns). Pete hasn’t partied with this group in years – he’s been away volunteering in a refugee camp, as he keeps reminding everyone – and he soon starts to feel anxious and at odds with his old pals. It doesn’t help that Harry’s stealing all the attention and seems to be turning everyone against him. As the weekend goes on and the bigoted banter intensifies, Pete’s paranoia reaches such a fever pitch that he begins to lose his grip on reality – is there a hostile atmosphere or is it all in his head? He reaches desperately for the herbal Kalms.
The film, which hops between hilarity, menace and despair, is a sort of social torture porn that skewers posh millennial angst. “There’s definitely a masochistic joy in everyone’s fears being played out for real,” says Palmer. “What if all those inner thoughts you have were actually true?” Those close to us are supposed to reassure us when we worry aloud that we’re not on form, but in All My Friends Hate Me, Pete’s friend Fig (Georgina Campbell), tells him: “Just so you know, you’re not doing too well. This weekend so far – you’ve been a bit crap, haven’t you?” It was one of the first scenes Stourton and Palmer wrote. “It would feel like a horror film if you were in a world where those pleasantries that make life easier weren’t involved, and you just had someone who spoke unbelievably honestly,” says Stourton.
Right at the start of the film, when Pete is on his way to the manor, he stops to have a wee on the side of a road and ends up getting chased by a man sleeping in his car. It’s a ludicrous sight and very funny, but it also brings to mind the scene in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, where Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris hits a deer while driving to stay with his in-laws. It creates a feeling of unease that doesn’t dissipate for the rest of the film. “We wanted to give the audience this clue that it wasn’t going to be a good time for Pete,” says Stourton. “It’s almost like an omen for the rest of the weekend.”
Stourton and Palmer have made a career out of taking the piss out of their own privilege. The duo, who make sketch comedy under the name Totally Tom, became a viral sensation in 2010 with High Renaissance Man, a spoof about a braying toff who studies history of art at Bristol (the same subject that Stourton did, at the same university). The Toms had met at Eton, the school that’s produced a string of Tory prime ministers, which they attended at the same time as Prince Harry. “That’s always felt like the safest thing to do, really – poke fun at ourselves. Posh people are fair game to us,” says Stourton. Palmer agrees: “We know them well.” Eton must have been ripe territory for comedy. “The thing about Etonians is that we’re so aware of being an Etonian that it breeds a self-awareness that is, in some ways, crippling… That was helpful for creating Pete,” says Stourton. Pete is trying to reinvent himself as an equal opportunities guy who’s passionate about humanitarian work and is so down to earth he’s even got a northern girlfriend (!) who offsets all his plummy pals. “You get a lot of Etonians who end up with cockney accents or are desperately trying to hide that they came from this place in some way,” Stourton adds.
The Toms conceived the idea for All My Friends Hate Me after Stourton attended a wedding and became convinced he’d been invited as a prank. “I’d drifted apart from the guys whose wedding it was, and then in the speeches I was like really panicking that the big reveal was going to be the groom on the microphone announcing I’d been invited as a joke,” he says. “I recounted that to Tom, and we were laughing about how narcissistic that was. That on someone else’s big day, I was like, ‘This is about me, oh my god’. But also it was pretty spooky, too, so the idea of a nice time with the perception of an underlying hostility felt like a good thing to expand on.”
While they’re satirising it, both Stourton and Palmer can relate to the social anxiety that Pete feels. “When I watched the film the first time, I was like, ‘Oh, this is just a very expensive therapy session that I’ve forced everyone to do for me,’” says Stourton, laughing. “But actually, it seems like Pete’s feelings are an acute version of something most people have experienced. It’s not something lots of people voice because you don’t want to be the downer at the party who says, ‘Does everybody hate me?’” He adds that he feels lucky to have friends that are “less repressed than Pete’s”, but admits he once spent six hours trying to figure out what to set as his Instagram profile picture. “I did change it eventually because someone told me it was cringe.”
Stourton and Palmer chose the reunion setting for All My Friends Hate Me because it felt like a good place from which to be subversive. It also just so happens to feel like the premise of a Richard Curtis film. Variety journalist Jessica Kiang pleasingly wrote that All My Friends Hate Me is what would happen if a Richard Curtis protagonist woke up with self-awareness. Others have called it an “evil Richard Curtis” movie. Stourton and Palmer are big fans of the Four Weddings and a Funeral filmmaker. “We watched Love Actually as a tradition at boarding school every Christmas,” says Stourton. “We were claiming it was ironic but actually we were in floods of tears.”
“All My Friends Hate Me is kind of iconoclastic in a way,” says Palmer, admitting the connection. “Just taking something that is so revered, the charming befuddled British romantic hero who travels so well in the movie world, but imagining, what if he was actually just a total dick? Or what if the way this charming group of people celebrated was doing drugs and shooting pheasants? We were trying to mash griminess and Hollywood cliche together.”
Even though the film is quite absurdist, it probably does show a more realistic version of what toffs might get up to on the weekend than a Curtis film. “All the characters in Curtis’s films have these incredibly awkward moments that come off as somehow charming, and people bumble their way out of it, but it felt interesting to be like, well, no, what if someone experienced a genuinely awkward moment, and then felt terrible about it and would wake up five years later in the middle of the night thinking about it?”
What do they think Curtis would make of All My Friends Hate Me? “I hope he’d love it,” says Palmer. “Any comment whatsoever from Richard Curtis would be very cool because we really were brought up on that humour and Blackadder and all that stuff,” says Stourton.
Another inspiration for the film was the 2000 Ben Stiller cringe comedy, Meet the Parents. “If that many bad things were happening to him, it would feel like a horror film,” says Palmer, adding that horror and comedy are so close as genres because “horror is filled with moments of release and jump scares, but they’re basically punchlines”.
“We wanted to release the tension at the right time with a gag, so it didn’t become too unpleasant to watch and you didn’t wonder why anyone was bothering to stick around at this reunion,” he says.
The Toms are planning on making more films of this ilk. “Maybe one set at Christmas, and one set at a wedding, leading to interpersonal tense dynamics, crossing the genres of really high elevated drama with the mundane triviality of a dinner or a party,” says Palmer. “Any event with lots of repressed English people getting drunk feels like good territory,” says Stourton. They won’t be turning down any invites in the coming months, then, in the name of research. Their friends should watch out, I say. “It’s getting really bad, that wedding story,” says Stourton. “Every time I tell it, I give one more detail away and eventually the people are going to be like, ‘Are you talking about us?’”
Well, there’s one more thing to lie awake at night worrying about.
‘All My Friends Hate Me’ is in cinemas on 10 June
Kristin Scott Thomas and Hugh Grant in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’, an inspiration for Stourton and Palmer
