FRIENDSHIP (2024)

A suburban dad falls hard for his charismatic new neighbour.

by James Lee 10th May 202510th May 2025 Leave a reply

Unabashed social dysfunction has been a prolifically successful staple of modern ‘cringe comedy’ for decades, but few comedians in the last several years have decided to fully commit to that conceit as vociferously as Tim Robinson. Social cues are best read and understood when they’re conveyed effortlessly—and Robinson’s someone willing to display a persona who’s investing as much strained, tenuous effort as humanly possible into conveying those cues himself, so much so that it’s as disquieting as it is gut-bustingly hilarious.

Look no further than the first sketch of his marquee Netflix series I Think You Should Leave, in which Robinson’s character, faced with a push-door that halts after he tries pulling on it, tugs on it with all of the strength he can muster, causing the door to creak on its hinges before eventually breaking the doorframe wide open and straining to the degree where his forehead veins are about to violently burst out of his face. The best part? He’s done that after what appears to be a relatively successful job interview, in full view of his interviewer, and two things become immediately apparent: one, if you’re not on this comedic wavelength, you won’t be on board for most of Robinson’s output; and two, if you want to witness a feature-length version of one of these painfully hilarious sketches, you’re likely to be a fan of Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship.

Here’s the thing about Robinson’s comedic shtick: it has a nice correspondence and rhyme to the recent cultural awareness of the “male loneliness epidemic”. Taken on its face, it appears to be a deeply serious affair; modern standards of masculinity are gradually preventing men from forming meaningful relationships and social connections on platonic and romantic levels, isolating them completely from the people around them. But channelled through the lens of DeYoung’s writing and direction, which maximises as much conceivable use out of Robinson’s socially inept persona as possible, there’s a level of irreverent satire that Friendship lends to its own idea of what exactly it is that leads modern men to this kind of despondent loneliness, and the escalation of absurdity it offers leads to a sustained, feature-length experience of unalloyed hilarity.

Male loneliness typically stems from deep internal incongruity—a man’s current self being unable to stack up to the ideal self he’d like to achieve on a social level. And Friendship throws us straight into the gauntlet with a cancer-survivor support group scene featuring long-married suburban couple Craig (Robinson) and Tami (Kate Mara)—the latter of whom is one year free of cancer, and makes the confession that she hasn’t orgasmed in a significantly long time… to which, on Craig’s turn, he immediately takes it upon himself to proudly proclaim that he’s orgasmed plenty in that span of time.

Here’s a man unwilling to even be inadvertently emasculated in a public setting, but through his violently unsubtle efforts of avoidance, winds up falling into a completely different pit of embarrassment entirely. And it doesn’t end there; he makes a point out of not wanting to be spoiled for the latest Marvel film, which has formed a reputation for driving people insane. He insists on buying all of his clothes from the exact same brand, and makes a point out of it to every person he meets. His son, Steven (Shazam!’s Jack Dylan Grazer), despite being teenage, is still far too physically comfortable with his mother, while being relatively distant yet tolerant of his father.

So when a package arrives on Craig and Tami’s doorstep that’s addressed to another house, Craig takes it upon himself to return it to its rightful owner, Austin (Paul Rudd), whose charisma immediately stokes an effortless chemistry with Craig, and their first encounter ends with a vow for them to hang out and have a few beers soon. In that time, and in the hangouts that follow, we see a version of Austin that simply oozes charisma; he owns artefacts dating back thousands of years, crafted by prehistoric humans. He leads his very own rock band, which garners significant audiences from local townsfolk. And perhaps most notably, he’s the weatherman for the nighttime local news slot, soon to be promoted to the morning slot by his superiors for his effortless charm and interaction. He brings around a posse of blokes of his own while having aspirations of owning a yellow sports car that are closer to reality than they seem.

In other words, he’s everything that Craig wants to be, and exactly the kind of person whom Craig wants to be friends with—to the point where the film takes us down a subjectively hallucinatory montage in which Austin places so much trust and faith in Craig after their hangouts that he goes so far as to promise Craig that he’ll be among the first to watch Austin go through major milestones in life. But Craig faces his first real test of male social aptitude when he winds up face-to-face with Austin’s squad of friends and, true to form, stumbles through virtually every step of this gathering. At one point, literally, as he accidentally walks into a screen glass door so hard that it shatters to pieces minutes after he opens it and steps into the room. A bout of mockery that ensues later on is the straw that breaks the camel’s back—and the rupturing of bro-code that Craig engages in eventually proves to be the trigger for the unsettling hilarity at the centrepiece of this film’s quest for true social connection at the cost of every social norm.

Friendship is a deeply intriguing demonstration of form, in that its reflections of Craig’s mental and emotional instability permits it to navigate different filmmaking styles and techniques on a constant basis, all while consistently being able to ground itself in absurdist humour. Not once is Craig’s profound masculine toxicity ever taken completely seriously and at tonal face value, although the depths it takes him down make for interesting detours through which the film can navigate a variety of imaginative, scattershot fits of amusing experimentation.

One instance, a detour into the tunnels below the film’s central town takes a turn for something genuinely tense, its cinematography highlighting the darkness of the pathways in a way comparable to most recent horror releases. In another, a desperate connection Craig forms with a local phone shop’s employee culminates in a hilariously psychedelic scene that completely brought the house down in the theatre I saw it in, built up as a trip into pure, unalloyed immersion that fulfils that promise in a wildly unexpected way, and then ends before the audience has time to process what in the world just happened.

While Friendship ostensibly has somewhat of a large cast to work with, it’s Robinson and Rudd who get most of their time’s worth out of the characters they’re offered. Rudd is virtually pitch-perfect in the role of Austin, a masculine ideal who eventually morphs into an everyman, a man so jam-packed with charisma in Craig’s eyes that he easily sidesteps the fact that Austin is substantially less satisfied in the daytime anchorman job, and is also the one character willing to draw the strongest boundaries around who gets to be part of his life.

But even with that level of personality, Austin isn’t nearly as much of a full character as Craig, who we’re following from top to bottom of this film, all while repeatedly tapping into the ways he elects to see the world around him. Robinson’s historically expert understanding of how to squeeze hilarity out of painful social ineptitude pays off dividends here, with the film’s feature length allowing him to explore the emotional voids within Craig that he’s so desperately trying to fill, but stalwartly refusing to turn those voids into exercises for self-pity and dramatic excess, and instead exploiting them for all of the OMG-inducing laughs they’re worth.

Yet one of I Think You Should Leave‘s notable traits is how it literally breezes by—each episode of the show runs for no longer than 20 minutes, which means each sketch only runs for about five minutes each. And while Friendship isn’t exactly an endeavour from the team of ITYSL, the unimpeachable presence of Robinson in this specific kind of role means that it’s inevitably indebted to that show’s style of comedy. The notion of potentially stretching out one of those sketches to feature length seems to have resulted in a film with some mild inconsistencies and wrinkles along the way. Characters like Mara’s Tami could prove to be even more stultifying and hilarious than they already are if given their further due, and some of the aesthetic and genre detours the film takes could have cohered more strongly had they been unified with anything beyond the film’s ubiquitous dedication to satirical humour.

And yet, Friendship‘s introduction of DeYoung as a distinct comedic directorial voice and Robinson’s first major big-screen role is certainly nothing to be scoffed at. This is a film destined to enter the ranks of cult comedies, where the most ideal experience of it is witnessing it in a theatre full of people who get it—not just on the level of Robinson’s extreme and distinct brand of humour, but also on the level of looking at the crisis of masculinity plaguing our classrooms, relationships, and politics, and wanting to point and laugh at it as hard as they damn well please.

USA | 2024 | 100 MINUTES | 1.65:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH