I walked into Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship at its U.S. premiere at SXSW 2025, not quite knowing what to expect. The premise—a suburban dad desperate for a new friend whose enthusiasm spirals into chaos—seemed ripe for uncomfortable laughs and maybe even some quietly incisive social commentary. To its credit, the film delivers flashes of both. But as things get weirder, louder, and increasingly unhinged, I found myself slipping further away from it.
Tim Robinson stars as Craig, the lonely, over-eager suburban dad at the heart of this comedy. Now, here’s the thing: Robinson is an acquired taste. If you’re a fan of I Think You Should Leave, you may find him hilarious in that specific, cringe-heavy way he’s mastered. But for someone like me, less familiar with his work and less attuned to his manic, twitchy energy, he’s… a lot. His performance walks the line between pitiful and insufferable, and while that may be precisely what the film is aiming for, I found it exhausting rather than endearing.
As the impossibly cool new neighbor, Paul Rudd does his usual charming thing—and it works. Rudd plays the straight man with just enough mystery to keep things interesting. It’s surprisingly clever when the film stays within a grounded realm of awkward suburban male bonding. There are moments, especially early on, where you can see where this could’ve been a sharp satire of modern masculinity, loneliness, and identity crises in middle-class cul-de-sacs. Kate Mara and Jack Dylan Grazer offer solid support, though both are underused as the plot shifts increasingly into absurdity.
Unfortunately, once the story starts to veer into the bizarre (and then the full-on surreal), it loses its grip. The escalation doesn’t feel earned—it feels like a writer’s room dared itself to see how far they could push the weirdness. There’s a difference between unexpected and nonsensical, and that line gets crossed somewhere in the back half of the film. The humor becomes alienating rather than funny, and whatever emotional stakes were set up early on quickly evaporate.
That’s not to say the film is without merit. DeYoung’s direction has a confident sense of tone early on, and the first 30 minutes are genuinely engaging. When it works, the comedy taps into real insecurities with a sharp edge. But by the end, I felt more irritated than entertained—like I’d been invited to a dinner party that started charming but ended with the host throwing food at the walls while everyone else insisted it was art.
Friendship will no doubt have its fans—especially among those already on the Tim Robinson wavelength—but for me, it just didn’t click. When it was funny, it was funny. When it got weird, it lost me.