All My Friends Hate Me

It's Pete's birthday and the old gang from college are throwing him a party out in the country. During what’s meant to be a joyful weekend reunion, Pete finds himself increasingly unnerved by his friends inside jokes and snarky comments. Is he being paranoid or is he the butt of some elaborate joke?

So "Pete" (co-writer Tom Stourton) sets off to spend his birthday weekend with some university friends he hasn't seen for a few years, at the rather gorgeous stately pile of one of their parents. Things don't bode well as he arrives to find nobody else there. They'd gone to the pub and he didn't know! That sets the tone for the rest of this rather thinly-spread comedy drama as he - a somewhat earnest charity worker in Africa - gradually begins to feel alienated by them, and their new found friend "Harry" (Dustin Demri-Burns) whom he suspects is deliberately trying to poison them against him. The original premiss is actually quite good, but the execution struggles as poor old "Pete" finds himself becoming more and more paranoid - even when his girlfriend "Sonia" (Charly Clive) arrives and seems to join in, before an ending that could hardly have gone more askew for the man! The humour stems from some posh-boy and country bumpkin stereotypes with a little cocaine, plenty of booze and a bit of sexual tension, but for me this film just doesn't ever stand out. Stourton has that curse of the tall man and despite his best efforts, he is not at all natural in front of the camera. The rest of the characterisations are pretty weak and indeed pretty odious, and by midway through I am afraid I really didn't care much for any of them or what happened. To be fair to director Andrew Gaynord, I doubt he had much of a budget and the production standards are decent enough but I just found there was not enough story to carry this.