Steven Stelfox (Nicholas Hoult) is an A&R agent for a top record label. Those who live and breathe music would kill for that job. He lives and breathes cocaine. When one of his colleagues outperforms him, he copes by listing the different names for it – blow, bugar-sugar, lump etc – like counting to ten. When that doesn’t work, he starts killing.
It becomes obvious that Stelfox cares little for music, doesn’t really know what he likes, and is more concerned with the money running out on his perpetual rave. In John Niven’s original book, which I have not read, that may have been a satirical comment on the music industry. It feels like that has been lost here.
For instance, the narrator of the novel might have described the industry’s machinations with some wit, and between the lines would be someone marginally relatable. Hoult’s Stelfox is, on the other hand, completely lacking in charisma – well short of Christian Bale’s gleefully insane turn in American Psycho (2000). That speaks to the character, I suppose, and to the filmmakers’ credit, they never apologise for nor humanize his behaviour.
Tom Riley and Craig Roberts play characters of some welcome integrity, but do so in disappointingly one-note performances, leaving Hoult’s reptilian boob without a leg to stand on. Thankfully, Georgina King’s opportunistic assistant and Edward Hogg’s blackmailing investigator put Stelfox through the ringer with performances that are more complexly psychotic. And there is some brief joy in Moritz Bleibtreu’s wacky turn as a German producer.
There remains, however, a failure to take those strengths and apply them to the core of the film. You never really know why Stelfox is resorting to killing his so called friends when it never seems very necessary. Nor do you understand his drug habit when the filmmakers mostly revel in its ugliness. It’s like watching him removed, through the eyes of his disapproving mother.
Allow me another comparison: there is as much hedonism here as there was in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), cinematically and narratively. However, where Scorsese (and Boyle and Aronofsky) has proven himself to be a master of pushing that dosage to the limit, director Owen Harris’ assemblage is of the DIY bathtub variety. The result is terrifying and leaves you with a nasty hangover.
Review Score: TWO STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Kill Your Friends was reviewed as part of the BBC First British Film Festival 2015
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