An excruciating experience in social anxiety, passive aggression, paranoia, and every other kind of discomfort. It reminded me of
The Invitation, another movie about a gathering of old friends and lovers where nothing is outwardly wrong, but a low key menace seems to pervade every interaction, to the point where the main character begins to question his sanity.
The Invitation was outwardly a much heavier film, touching on grief and trauma.
All My Friends Hate Me is more innocuous on the surface--just some old University friends getting together to celebrate the birthday of the one in their group who was always the life of the party. Yet that old party guy, now an aid worker in a refugee camp, just can't seem to connect to his old friends, finds himself being accused of small improprieties, suffers small, unaccountable impolitenesses, feels somehow on the outside of every group interaction, and on and on as a suffocating feeling of disquiet grows. It's excruciating; anyone who suffers the least amount of social anxiety will find this all triggering.
For someone like me who finds, for instance, cringe comedy hard to endure, this movie was not enjoyable in a traditional sense. I had to pause constantly to get a break from my own second hand embarrassment and all the stress it produced. There's a lot here designed to make you wince and grit your teeth. But I was nevertheless hooked; I very much wanted to discover what was motivating all this discomfort, if it was a
Gaslight scenario or truly all in the main character's head. A movie like this, the reveal can go either way, and there's always a element of coincidence necessary to keep the cogs moving--maybe too much, in this case. I can't say, ultimately, if the ambiguities of the ending are productive or obscuring. There's a hesitant catharsis that isn't redeemed by a real conclusion. The story stops more than ends. But the final scene effectively summarizes a running theme in the movie of the cruelty of humour, of the way jokes can wound and exclude without recourse, because they are after all just jokes, lighten up. The ending, tho' it risks being unsatisfying due to a significant ellipsis, finds a perfect not to end on, giving the most weighted and ugly example of the 'humour' the movie traffics in.
Much hinges on whether it's the group that's changed, or the lead, and while we get no explicit answer, my own suspicion is that...
...it's the lead who's changed and for the better, but without realizing it. I think the group in general was fond of a malicious, exclusionary type of humour designed to provoke misery. The lead's memories of those years seem imprecise, even hazy, so I'd guess he doesn't fully remember the kind of ugly mockery and prankishness and he and the others got up to. The story about tormenting the girl to suicide as a 15-year-old suggests the kind of malicious pranks he found funny, and his sense of being 'skippy', or the skipper, ie. the group's leader, also suggests he was the ringleader of a lot of the vicious mockery, tho' he disclaims some of these past antics now (but there's a streak of dishonesty to him I don't think he recognizes). The offhand comments from the others that he was an old reprobate, or they'd hoped he'd take of therapy, also suggests something maybe off the rails or hysterical about his old behaviour, too, an extremity that was masking or compensating for something, some unhappiness. My guess: he unknowingly outgrew his own cruel humour and now, not seeing the change in himself, can't recognize the group's actions for what they are and feels---rightly--that he is the victim of it. Since he can't participate or understand, he can only endure. One more cruelty awaits, an awful joke by his fiance that implies he's in for a lot more torment in the future. Never has a smile of relief been so contextually hollow.