Full spoilers for A24’s new dark comedy, Friendship. The duo you never expected is here at last! Check this out if you think you’ll like it, but I’ll say up top, you have to be a fan of cringe comedy.

Friendship(2025) stars Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, Josh Segarra, Meredith Garretson, Jon Glaser, Connor O’Malley, and Craig Frank. It was written and directed by Andrew DeYoung.

Cringe comedy is interesting. It’s not always my go-to, it depends on the person writing and the sense of humor of the comedian. It mainly means I can’t always binge a show. I hate The Office for this reason, and I find Peep Show insanely funny but hard to watch. Tim Robinson loves cringe comedy. I watched his sketch show I Think You Should Leave before this came out and it can be a bit hit or miss for me, sometimes the jokes go on for so long and I kind of want to turn it off but then here’s a serious intervention held in “Jim Davis’s house” decorated entirely with Garfield furniture and reclining tongue chairs. Fucking brilliant.
Anyway, this movie.

This movie is certainly an exercise in cringe comedy. And it is… if this movie had an equivalent exercise, it would be the wall sit. Or the burpie. This was quite a hard watch. You would get that impression from the trailer, surely. There’s no getting around it, it is one of the hardest watches I’ve ever encountered for this thing I do. Not because it was bad. On the contrary. But Tim Robinson plays one of the most horrifying and unlikable fictional characters I’ve ever encountered. He plays Craig Waterman and Craig Waterman is unendingly loathsome. Here’s a simple list of some of the worst things he does:

– Repeatedly claims his wife won’t get cancer again, dismissing the very real worries she has, at a cancer survivor group.
– After his wife says she hasn’t orgasmed since having cancer, says “I’ve been orgasming fine” as if it didn’t matter.
– Breaks Paul Rudd’s sliding glass door, with ignorance.
– Oversteps his bounds during a friendly sparring session with Paul and his friends and knocks Paul out temporarily.
– Puts soap in his mouth and apologizes to these grown men by saying he was a bad widdle boy.
– Ignores basic context clues constantly.
– Broke into Paul Rudd’s house.
– Stole Paul Rudd’s gun.
– Ignored his wife’s requests for a bigger car, refusing to take her and her flower business seriously.
– Lost his wife in a sewer, showing little to no remorse.
– Ratted on Paul Rudd and got him arrested.
– Threatened to beat the shit out of and kill the Mayor.
– Gave no real apology to his wife when she was rescued from the sewer.
– Licked a psychedelic toad instead of fighting for his wife and cleaning up his act, or doing anything to be a better person.
– Finally bought his wife a van but then immediately wrecked it by driving it through the speed bump that he insisted City Council install.
– Broke in to Paul Rudd’s house again and threatened him and his friends at gunpoint, forcing them to get to know him.
– Existed.

And there’s definitely some stuff I missed, but he’s baaad. Which makes it hard to watch the movie because we spend much of the runtime with him. It’s an interesting performance. It is very much like an I Think You Should Leave sketch that never ends, and there are moments where the performance falters and we see the cracks in his abilities as an actor as he leans too much into parody. But it mostly works. The main issue is that he makes Craig far too unlikable to the point that I can’t quite buy that he got married, had a child, and got a fairly prominent position at a marketing firm.

The writing in this is fairly brilliant throughout. Andrew DeYoung knows what he’s doing. The obvious ones people will fixate on are the ridiculous things Robinson says, but he doesn’t get all the best lines. Not that the two friends who were taking Fireball shots in the parking lot that asked Andrew and I if we were seeing Friendship noticed. They were clearly big fans of ITYSL and laughed at every single thing Robinson said, even if it wasn’t funny. But there are many great bits throughout.

There’s an early daydream sequence in which Craig imagines that the world has fallen apart in apocalyptic mayhem and everyone thanks him for gathering firewood and making the City Council install speed bumps. There’s a completely random guy who comes to his house to celebrate his wife’s safe return who talks with him about what kind of decade the 70’s was. This whole conversation feels very “Dad”. And then he screams at Craig judging him for losing his wife. Later this guy gets up in front of everyone at the “Welcome back from the sewer” party and says he wishes the US hadn’t pulled out of Afghanistan, and everyone claps. It’s a very weird but very funny bit.

And perhaps my favorite sequence of the film is when Craig goes to an 18 year old who works at a phone store and sells drugs in the back. He ignores all the typical options and chooses to lick the back of a toad, but his big life-changing trip is just him waking up in Subway and ordering a sandwich from a white-haired Paul Rudd. My instinct, while revisiting these different bits, is to fall in love with this movie, but there’s so much cringe to get past first. Anyway, it’s time to get to the Paul of it all. New segment.

The Paul of it All
Okay. So. This movie was billed as a two-hander between Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, but I would say that’s not really true. He is a co-star essentially but it really is a Tim Robinson movie more than anything else. But Paul Rudd sells more tickets I suppose.

He gives a very interesting performance I need to rewatch to fully take in. Paul mainly has to play the straight man and the subtleties of a guy who made the worst decision possible in befriending a new neighbor. The funniest thing he does throughout is play a fairly normal dude with massive insecurities and pathos of his own. It gets hidden and overshadowed by Tim Robinson’s obsession with him, but he’s just a weird guy. Here are some facts about Austin Carmichael:

– He collects ancient stone daggers that probably aren’t real.
– He has a golden gun in case the apocalypse comes.
– His dream car is a tacky yellow sports Ferrari something.
– He’s the nighttime weatherman for the local news, and when Craig encourages him to ask for a promotion, he finds out he’s pretty bad at his job.
– He has a wife we barely see.
– In his free time he sneaks into an aqueduct and drinks beers on the roof of city hall and picks and cooks mushrooms.
– He has a band.
– He hangs out with his friends in his garage and sings “My Boo” and has sparring sessions with ridiculous headgear.
– He secretly is pretty bald and wears a toupee, like Marky Mark in the movie Flight Risk.

And that’s mostly what we get of Paul’s Austin Carmichael. He’s got a touch of Brian Fantana in his performance. Paul Rudd has played the not-so-secretly insecure hiding behind masculinity guy before, but this is a more realistic shade, and in earlier scenes when he comes on strong he does seem a little cartoony. I suppose my main complaint about modern comedic Rudd in these kinds of movies is that he always gives a solid performance but the writers working with him tend to not use him to his fullest potential.

Friendship had the same problem for me as Death of a Unicorn in that it settled on what was a good Paul Rudd performance rather than an excellent one. Of course he’s not the lead in these movies, but he’s prominent in both and doing what he’s given. Compare these movies to Role Models and I Love You, Man. Or Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Knocked Up.

When he’s the lead and the writer knows how to write for him, he’s a comedic powerhouse. When he’s playing those smaller parts he knows what he’s doing and how to play it. I think the main issue is that the era of comedy he really excelled in has passed and the people making weirder stuff don’t quite know what to do with him. Which makes me curious for Power Ballad, his first musical, but especially for Anaconda. Will he fall into the background of another monster movie with a good cast? Or will he excel? We’ll see. He did do a good job, to be clear. There are many great tiny moments throughout.

I must reiterate when I talk about criticisms or weird moments in this that I vastly prefer this kind of movie for Paul Rudd. I’d much rather see a dozen Death of a Unicorns and a thousand Friendships than another lukewarm Ghostbusters sequel. Yucky. Anyway, miscellaneous thoughts.

• Reviews I read said Kate Mara wasn’t given enough to do but she is in this more than I thought, and I thought she was great. She’s a good counter to Craig’s insanity, even if I still don’t believe she’d marry him.
• While I can appreciate why this movie is seen as the thriller version of I Love You, Man, it’s not really that. They’re lampooning different kinds of male loneliness. I Love You, Man goes for broad comedy, reframing a romantic comedy around two new friends, and Friendship attacks men in their 40’s and 50’s who are stuck in jobs and lives they hate. And they examine when a man with clearly unresolved issues encounters a more normal variety of this kind of disorder.
• I also find it interesting that they never peel back the layers on Craig, which is why he sometimes remains a typical Tim Robinson character. But I don’t think they’re trying to avoid going deeper, DeYoung knew if they showed us a hyper-masculine or traumatizing father it would feel like we’re meant to empathize with him, and we’re clearly not.
• The result is that the brief moments of competence and humanity he shows sometimes feel unearned, and the premise that he has a wife and a son in high school still feels unrealistic. Even if we are led to believe he’s just been quietly horrible and inattentive for decades.
• The moments when he stops being awful and feels pure emotion are interesting because he doesn’t exactly take them on board. They do temporarily trick you into thinking he’ll change for the better, even though it’s clearly not that kind of movie. It’s interesting.
• Shoutout to whoever chose the song “My Boo” for this movie.
• I am curious what this movie would be like if they leaned even more into the horror aspects and made this from Paul’s perspective. Maybe my friend Andrew and I wouldn’t have been traumatized and wondered if we were Craig, the worst person ever, if our POV character was the guy that didn’t suck.
• Obviously the comedy comes from the guy who doesn’t get it and makes bad choices, and maybe if they flipped it it would feel more like a Dinner For Schmucks scenario.
• Oh additional shoutout to the costume department for giving Paul so many fun new looks: Ridiculous golfing outfit for a news segment Paul Rudd, Renaissance Festival Paul Rudd, oh no toupee Paul Rudd, psychedelic toad trip white-haired Subway Paul Rudd, and sexy blue flannel Paul Rudd.
• For a while I had no idea how the movie would end, or if it ever would, but the one they chose was as good as any. Craig throws away his chance at a good family life and holds Paul and his friends at gunpoint for no reason. Then Paul tries to take the gun from him and in the chaos, Craig insists if anyone gets up he’ll shoot them so nobody sees that Paul has a toupee, and is arrested after running through the sliding glass door again.
• The child-like joy Craig feels in the last shot when he’s sitting in the cop car and Paul gives him a “thank you for covering for me on the toupee” wink is well-played. I can see why someone would get obsessed with being friends with Paul Rudd after having a taste of connection and having it yanked away. Just maybe not this Paul Rudd, which is also the point. He’s not that great.
• Hmmm.
• I did think at the end that this may be the most insane movie Paul Rudd has ever done. But then I remembered that one where he’s married to Parker Posey and she can’t orgasm until she has sex with Danny DeVito, and the one where he’s an FBI agent with bleach blonde hair in Hong Kong trying to stop rogue agents and killer robots. So it may not be the most insane, in retrospect.

Overall Rating: 8.2/10(This may change on a rewatch, but it was fun, and it was new, and I didn’t see a lot of the jokes coming. I want Andrew DeYoung to write more movies and I would probably enjoy seeing Tim Robinson in more things too.)
Rudd Rating: 7.4/10(A great performance is all well and good, but Paul Rudd with a giant bald spot and hair around the sides is not for me. I didn’t need that image in my head. I’ve got enough anxieties about my own hair, I don’t need to question the longevity of his.)

Next time… I haven’t decided yet! Maybe that Audible thing? Maybe the Wet Hot prequel TV series? I’m getting to the end of my list of stuff I still need to review, and it’s mostly stuff I have watched and didn’t like or stuff with cameos I don’t really care about. If you have a specific one for me to cover, let me know.
When I do get caught up I’m thinking I might revisit the top five and bottom five. Who knows? Anyway, thanks for reading!