FRIENDSHIP: An extended ITYSL sketch, but also not?

Fans of I Think You Should Leave have been eagerly anticipating the release of the movie Friendship, starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, since it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall.

Though the film was written and directed by Andrew DeYoung (in his feature debut), most reactions summed up the film as a 100-minute ITYSL sketch. This makes sense; in interviews about the movie, DeYoung, who has extensive experience directing ITYSL-adjacent TV (including episodes of The Other Two, AP Bio, Shrill, Pen15,  I Love That For You, and Our Flag Means Death), stated that he wrote the lead part with Robinson in mind.

That ITYSL DNA definitely shows through, in big and small ways.

Most obviously, the film's central premise fits perfectly into the ITYSL structure. Craig Waterman is a socially inept, well-meaning suburban dad, husband, and corporate drone. When he meets and befriends his effortlessly cool and interesting new neighbor Austin, played by Rudd, Craig initially starts to blossom into a more adventurous and confident version of himself.

But, true to the ITYSL format, his inherent insecurities and misunderstanding of social dynamics end up souring the friendship, and Craig doubles, triples, and quadruples-down trying to save face, salvage the friendship, and chase the high of Austin's reflected glow.

Interspersed within that overall storyline are a handful individual scenes that serve the plot development, but could also stand alone as ITYSL sketches even without the larger context of the film. Awkward work meetings and calls, hangout sessions with new friend groups that go awry, and a particularly memorable toad-induced hallucinatory journey all have the familiar settings and style of I Think You Should Leave, with the same type of comedic payoff. 

Comedically, Craig alternates between the role of straight man, as a naive and simple suburbanite trying to navigate unfamiliar, surreal situations, and the familiar ITYSL role of the unhinged outsider who alienates the people around him in his increasingly desperate attempts to fit in. And, of course, no Tim Robinson project would be complete without a scene of him and Conner O'Malley yelling at each other.

But the small touches are what make the movie most feel like I Think You Should Leave. Little mannerisms like Craig's shuffling, hunched half-run when hurriedly returning a mis-delivered package, slightly-off phrasing like "I look like a Marvel", and dadcore outfits sourced from a casual dining restaurant all feel straight out of ITYSL.

In my theater, viewers would occasionally bust out in giggles at the little non-joke moments satirizing social banality that were sprinkled between the more in-your-face comedic scenes. Too-full coffee mugs, too-overt social mirroring, and too-affectionate mother-son interactions fill its liminal moments, capturing the same types of minor, familiar daily oddities that ITYSL has a particularly sharp eye for.

Part of what makes the film a bit hard to pin down is how much it doesn't look and feel like a comedy.

It's artfully shot in a way that at times feels like a cozy indie character study, and at times feels like a taut psychological thriller. ITYSL plays up this suspenseful tone to great effect in a few sketches (Calico Cut Pants and Honk If You're Horny, most notably). But Friendship also takes the time for some simple, lovely setting shots and elegantly framed scenes in a way that sketch comedy can't.

That patience helps the comedic moments feel that much more surreal, while also building the sense of dread at Craig's inevitable bad choices. But the pacing that serves the film well in the first two acts ends up undermining its ending. This is its biggest departure from the I Think You Should Leave formula--whereas ITYSL sketches steadily build to a chaotic crescendo, Friendship's finish felt like it had missed the chance to kick things up one more level for its climax. When the credits rolled, I wanted more from it.

On top of the absurdist cringe comedy and indie aesthetics, there's a commentary on fragile masculinity and the difficulty of making friends as an adult, the kind of thesis that ITYSL doesn't have room for in its sub-5-minute sketches. It's a theme that is both extremely overt and somehow also a little underexplored.

We see it all through Craig's eyes, which means some of the side characters, like Rooney Mara as Craig's wife Tami, don't get to shine as much as they could. The film seems more focused on the absurdist cringeworthiness of Craig's actions than the social critique of those actions' impacts. 

Ultimately, discomfort is where Friendship is most comfortable, and it inflicts that discomfort even on a meta level: trying to categorize it yields repeated trips to the uncanny valley. It succeeds with enough elements of comedy, satire, and suspense that classifying it into any of those genres feels wrong.

But for Tim Robinson fans, feeling wrong is the main attraction, and there's a lot to love about Friendship.