Friendship (2025)

Watched 6/11/25 (theater)

Right down to the cosmic touches in its most fascinating and hilarious scenes, Friendship shoots up with comic steroids on its descent into Twilight Zone psychosis. It’s a stretched-out sketch reminiscent of the best Rod Serling teleplays infused with Tim Robinson’s signature brand of humor. It’s fancily shot and intriguingly chaotic. It’s out-of-this-world cartoonish in the most strange of ways. It’s right on time for the weird time we live in.

A24 backs this Andrew DeYoung production, with a script perfectly tailored to its star’s talents and aestetically astute to the studio’s brand of trippy freakouts. DeYoung is a director I was unfamiliar with until this picture, but he deftly blends his psychedelic take on modern suburbia with the pulse-poundingly awkward timing of his Detroit-drawn muse. Tim Robinson, who has made career headway through bite-sized humor on Netflix and SNL, fits the bill perfectly for the central role of Craig, an overmatched marketing executive slowly and then quickly losing his shit and his family through a series of events so funny and surreal, it could only come from a collaboration of pure madness. Seriously, the jarring oddness of this project could not come from just one person. There are clearly a few guys here just laughing their asses all the way to a great stew of highly-specific social observations pushed to the edge.

The plot specifics of Friendship are less specific. We kind of just follow Craig on a series of spiralling adventures ranging from the absurd to the pensive. It’s a questionable premise that somehow answers all questions, not filled with ambition but instead patched up with bullets that hit their marks.

Twilight Zone was built off of twists and turns, and this movie has plenty of those, albeit more episodic in presentation within its 1hr-40min construction. The twists largely hit often enough and with enough shock value/novel creativity to ensure that even if you don’t dig one setpiece, you’ll probably find something to appreciate in the next. Seriously, everything from Subway drug trips to drunk tank wig removals is here—it gets super out-there and it varies so much that you can truly see the seams. I just had such a blast that I didn’t fare that this was more of a sketch show.

The other aspect of the movie that both helped me stay engaged beyond its serial-television trappings was another Twilight-Zone inspired one. The photography of this. Everything from cosmic voiceovers to rage-induced fever dreams are captured through a constantly evolving, often quite effectively-zany camera. Psychedelic flourishes and well-timed doc-style closeups in particular play their roles well.

This isn’t all to say Friendship is a perfect movie. The pacing can be a bit off, perhaps more off for those unsure what they have signed up for. Point-A to Point-B is not on the minds of the creatives behind Friendship—it’s a loose structure, at best. Unlike those classic Twilight Zone episodes, you can’t see the beats measure up against a classic Save-The-Cat diagram, which will surely be frustrating for some. But the funny shit hits so hard and lingers so clearly that this complaint was non-existent for this viewer.

8.25/10