Kill Your Friends is a rare film about the record industry and the music business. There are, of course, lots of films about music, but the vast majority deal with the musicians themselves and the creation of great pieces of art. The point of Kill Your Friends, then, and the film’s central joke, is to show what happens when the rhetoric of films like Whiplash or Shine, in which music is transcendent, creative and individual, runs up against the realities of the record industry. In short, it gets shredded, processed and packaged for the public by people whose concern is purely profit.
Stephen Stehlfox (Nicholas Hoult) the film’s main character, is a uniquely cynical A&R man for a British record label, responsible for finding and signing new artists in pursuit of commercial hits. Set in 1997, when the British music industry was thriving, Stehlfox pursues advancement at the label and the “destruction of his enemies” with a unique ruthlessness which is equal parts drama and comedy. The drama comes from his tense and competitive relationships with his co-workers and the artists he’s looking to exploit.
The comedy in Kill your Friends arises, at least partially, due to the fact that he pontificates about that competition as though he was actually at war. He quotes Conan the Barbarian, reads about “unleashing his inner warrior” and loathes almost everyone he encounters. His colleagues are “sharks with hypodermic needles for teeth”, artists are people to deceive and exploit until their popularity runs out and the general public are a herd of cattle who will devour any trash so long as it’s marketed correctly.
The problem with Kill Your Friends, then, is that beyond Stehlfox’s monologue, there’s not much more to it. Stehlfox narrates much of the film himself, speaking directly to the audience, and patterns quickly emerge. He is always hammering on about the ruthlessness of the music industry and the only thing which saves it from being terribly repetitive is that his dialogue is extremely sharply written. He’s imaginative in his swearing, as outrageous as possible and transparent about his own awfulness.
Kill Your Friends takes much of its inspiration from film and television like The Wolf of Wall Street, House of Cards and especially American Psycho. Those works though, address perceived general problems with American culture in particular, which acts to sustain them for a long time. Kill Your Friends meanwhile, feels too long precisely because it has one point and one joke, which is told well in the film’s trailer, and it can only tell it more outrageously as the film drags on.
This wouldn’t be so glaring if the film was as artfully made as something like American Psycho, but it simply isn’t. Aside from one fight scene which is riveting because of the creativity and energy with which it’s shot, the rest is merely passable. It’s difficult after a while to distinguish between the same old back and forth shots in boardrooms between characters. Worse are the same conventional party scenes which have been better crafted recently in films like The Social Network. Given the amount of drink and drugs in the film it’s surprising the director, Owen Harris, doesn’t seize the opportunity to make these scenes as daring and disorienting for the audience as they presumably are for the characters. Instead, we’ve got continuations of conversations that characters have in the office, this time with some purple lighting and background music to show that this is a club.
Nicholas Hoult, who plays Stehlfox, is the strength of the film. His performance is outstanding, particularly since there are so few other developed, well-written characters in the film and Hoult consequently has to carry some scenes on his own. Much of the film’s dialogue is dependent on Stehlfox and the audience’s shared knowledge that he’s lying in a given situation, and Hoult’s subtle changes in his expression and sideways glances at the camera are brilliantly engineered for those moments. He’s menacing, pathetic and hilarious often in the same scene, which is no small feat.
Try as he might, Hoult cannot make the film work on his own. It’s repetitive, formulaic structure and very limited library of jokes sabotages it. The fact that things just “happen” in Kill Your Friends without the characters demonstrating wills of their own is a further irritation. By the time one character got over serious obstacles without any explanation, I’d given up on the film. It is a strange irony that a film about a corporation producing rote, artless junk falls into the same trap itself.
