Even a jazzed-up soundtrack can’t disguise the fact that you’d run a mile to avoid the five vacuous post-university friends who meet up in a country house to celebrate a birthday. They swap inane and unfunny dialogue to the point of irritation. As in most such theatrical films, better suited to the stage, the camera is merely plonked down in front of the person speaking, so there’s no visual interest either. At the end the mood changes, but who cares? It’s because of critics who don’t know a turkey when they see one that the British film industry keeps making such stagey TV fillers.
Sadly this is an unremarkable drama that skirts the fringes of comedy but never gets down to providing any laughs. That's a shame because as a straight forward social drama it's mediocre. There's been some much better studies of posh friends exploiting each other whilst reuniting and this one is all very anticlimactic. Pete (Tom Stourton) is looking forward to reuniting with his university 'gang' at the large country house of his best mate, George (Joshua Maguire) to celebrate Pete's birthday. But he's anxious as his ex girlfriend will be there and he's recently engaged. He's also disconcerted when he finds that the others have invited a local chap, the mildly strange and suspicious Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), a man he instantly dislikes but the others seem to love. As the weekend progresses Pete begins to feel he's the butt of some strange joke he doesn't get or that all his friends are revealing their deep seated dislike of him. There's the ever present threat in this film that violence will spill over and the central theme of social anxiety and the inability to read the situation has it's merits but the film seems to drag and ultimately ends disappointingly.