Friendship

But the surrounding world seems to have conspired to destroy his cozy and fragile stability. His wife, a florist withering in the shadow of her own dissatisfaction, voices complaints more and more often, while his teenage son erects a wall of silence and alienation. All Craig can do is suppress bouts of anger that occasionally burst out in incoherent curses.

And the municipal services clearly do not care about the beloved suburb where the Watermans reside, refusing to install a couple of “speed bumps” for the sake of deeper dead silence on the streets. And if there is anything in the universe to which Craig is truly devoted with passion, it is the safety and peace of his neighborhood.

The lulling serenity is disrupted by a new neighbor — Austin, a weather forecast host — who turns out to be an unattainable ideal for Craig. Moderately famous and devilishly charismatic, with an old-school hairstyle, he spends his evenings playing punk rock and exploring the city’s dangerous backstreets. And unlike his unlucky neighbor, he actually has friends.

Austin decides to help him escape from eternal gloom and invites him into his turbulent life. And so Craig, who had never known risk, suddenly finds himself knee-deep in a swamp, in dark catacombs, or behind the drums at a rock concert. The last one, though, only in his dreams.

The directorial debut of Andrew DeYoung, titled “Friendship”, tells a simple story about a midlife crisis that spares neither happy homebodies nor successful marketers. However, the sweet life full of adventures and adrenaline may well turn out to be counterfeit.

The thing is, Craig, whose free time is a yawning void, too easily absorbs someone else’s life. Any difference seems to him like the missing piece of a puzzle he has been searching for for decades. And blinded by the shine of another’s display window, he is ready to buy everything laid out in it.

From the outside, it may seem that assimilating another’s personality brings Craig great happiness and a heap of self-confidence. His wife has started to see him as an interesting person, and his son suddenly found topics to talk about. Even pesky colleagues began to scatter in fear before the assertive senior marketer.

But when the “honeymoon” between the newly minted friends turns into a rift, Craig plunges into even greater loneliness. The midlife crisis crashes head-on into a concrete wall of misunderstanding. The emptiness and grayness of his old life become much more noticeable against the backdrop of now-useless hobbies and desires.

The attempt to fit into the garments of someone else’s happiness exposes a hole in his own attire. In fleeing from indecision, Craig takes Austin’s ready-made recipe, but the more diligently he copies it, the more clearly the substitution is revealed. The image of the “perfect friend” becomes both a self-rescue project and a trap.

The need for acceptance by society turns into a dependence on external approval. Andrew De Young depicts male friendship as a stable structure of rules, boundaries, and rituals. And the protagonist clings to this orderliness, just to fend off the chaos of uncertainty.

The narrative methodically contrasts words and actions — where a simple honest admission of loneliness would suffice, a cascade of demonstrative fraternization arises. Outwardly, these rituals create the appearance of movement toward friendship, but in fact they prevent the conversation in which the characters would have to admit fear, shame, and their need for each other.

The film attempts to debunk the idea that male friendship cannot be built on vulnerable sincerity. Craig pulls someone else’s life from the display window to cover his own emptiness, but the abyss of alienation cannot be filled with trinkets. It can only be acknowledged, and on the backdrop of this bitter truth begin building a fragile bridge of relationships.