My adrenaline was very high by the end of All My Friends Hate Me, a film marketed as comedy/horror, which to me suggests something like An American Werewolf in London. This movie is not that! I definitely experienced it as more (psychological) horror than comedy, though I started expecting something truly terrible was going to happen by about 30 minutes in. I enjoyed the movie, though I think it's the sort of thing that might be more fun in a theater than at home on the couch. I barely recognized the movie I saw when I read this review describing it as a hilarious comedy, and wondered if it has to do with my age, or with the fact that I'm from the US and missed the very British in-jokes, or whether I had to have the right expectations based on knowing the previous work of the film-makers, the team known as Totally Tom. Or, perhaps this movie is some sort of horror/comedy Rorschach test.
You are probably more likely to find it escalatingly creepy and alarming if you identify with Pete, and more likely to find it escalatingly funny if you can somehow manage being in on the joke from the beginning. I don't know how attitudes about class and snobbery might also affect one's viewing of the film, but I found the group of friends both clueless and insufferable, and that may explain why my experience was closer to the escalating sense of paranoia described in this review from Cineuropa. Looking back at the contrast between the cruelty of many of the jokes, from those attributed to Pete in his own past, or those jokes they play on him during the party weekend, the film can be read as critical comment on comedy itself akin to Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, especially considering the film's final line. Of course, the movie could be more on the side of cruel humor than commenting on it, there's always that possibility. We're all living in the trolls' world now.
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