Review: Friendship – Men behaving badly

Directed by Andrew deYoung
Starring Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara

9/10

Making friends in your adult years can be tricky. Even when folks are married with kids, they still want to branch out socially with the people they meet in their lives when they feel a (purely platonic) attraction. This is what happens when Craig (Tim Robinson) meets his new neighbour Austin (Paul Rudd), who he quickly looks up to as a generally cool guy with a weatherman job who plays in a band, and has a good collection of close buddies.

What starts off as a budding new relationship quickly dissolves into a sort of ‘friend breakup’ where they just go back to being acquaintances. But Craig isn’t done with the friendship, and the more he tries reigniting it, the more he pushes both Austin and others in his life away.

With each passing scene, we see that Craig is even more antisocial than we feared. His cringiness may be exaggerated a little for comedic effect (which certainly gets the belly laughs), but his initial social awkwardness just starts snowballing into downright narcissistic and sociopathic behaviour, as if this antisocial conduct is becoming more devilishly deliberate rather than mere accidental awkwardness.

Tim Robinson does an incredible job with balancing how much empathy and disgust you should give to this character (though it’s likely to vary from each viewer). He just seems like an honest and earnest guy, a slightly boring everyman. Yet as his new friendship with Austin crumbles, so does his relationship with others. People like his wife (Kate Mara) and his co-workers see the shift in Craig’s emotional state, pushing them away as well—Craig’s whole arc can easily be seen as a cautionary tale of how not to be a human.

2025 is shaping up to be quite the year of films showing men increasingly making their situation more tense, dangerous and unpredictable. The previously released The Surfer and the upcoming Eddington also show how somewhat ordinary men can be turned to deranged vengeance when they hugely overreact to the slights they face from others. Friendship is the best of these because of how much deeper it probes into how to act socially and the funniest for how hilarious it shows all this.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN