In this interview feature for Letterboxd Journal about one of my favourite films of the last five years, co-writer/star Tom Stourton and co-writer Tom Palmer talk about their fantastically uncomfortable social anxiety horror film All My Friends Hate Me. 

The English film All My Friends Hate Me defies traditional labels. You could call it anxiety horror. Or anxiety comedy. Or cringe thriller. Maybe social torture porn.

Or you can rely on Letterboxd members to get even more specific. “The most uncomfortable I have been in a film in a very long time,” writes Arianne, who caught its Tribeca Film Festival premiere. “I’ve never seen a film that got social anxiety this right before,” claims Andrew, before admitting that “cringe comedy makes me wanna jump off a bridge.” But as Adam correctly observes, All My Friends Hate Me is “so much more than an exercise in discomfort”.

The plot concerns tall, awkward, thirty-ish Pete (played by Tom Stourton, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tom Palmer, his long-time partner in comedy duo Totally Tom), who is heading to a huge manor house in the countryside to spend a birthday weekend with upper-crust university chums he hasn’t partied with in several years. Well-meaning, but socially paranoid, Pete can’t help but feel out of place amongst his old friends, especially with all the snipey comments being made by their new pal Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), who seems to have it in for Pete.