Starring Tom Stourton, Charly Clive, Georgina Campbell, Antonia Clarke

Directed by Andrew Gaynord

BFI, out now

When Pete is invited to celebrate his birthday with some old university friends in a remote country house, events appear to take a sinister turn.

When is a horror film not a horror film? That is the question asked by Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton’s perfectly polished script for All My Friends Hate Me.

All the tropes are there. Pete (in what is surely a wry aside to 90s reunion drama Peter’s Friends) has been invited to a remote country house to celebrate his 31st birthday with a group of university chums with whom he has largely lost touch. He gets lost along the way, and struggles to get any sense from an aged and inscrutable local who he egregiously offends. There’s a whimpering mistreated dog. An angry, faceless figure sleeping in a wrecked car. The house is seemingly deserted. The friends exude a strained joviality laced with barely concealed malice. Later there are whispered, indistinct conversations, and a sinister interloper who seems to know a lot more than he should. And there are stories, unspoken history bubbling under the surface, threatening to come for Pete at any moment, not least in his dreams.

Oh yes, and it’s all genuinely funny, wince inducingly so.

It’s everything you dread about reunions and more.

All My Friends Hate Me could so easily be another rather tedious exploration of millennial insecurity and paranoia, and I’ve certainly seen a few stage-plays that have stolen precious hours from my life on this theme, but by harnessing the cinematic grammar of comedy horror it is able to dig a lot deeper into this particular social zeitgeist. If there’s such a thing as a ‘comedy of manners’ then this could equally be called a ‘horror of manners’ – even if ultimately the horrors are richly psychological rather than of the CGI variety.

The ensemble performances are excellent and Andrew Gaynord’s direction is elegant, economical and beautifully paced.

Verdict: All My Friends Hate Me is just about within the Sci-Fi Bulletin remit, but it only exists because the creative team clearly love the genres we love, and they have harnessed them to fashion something genuinely memorable and original. 9/10

Martin Jameson