Kill Your Friends (2015) Director: Owen Harris (18)
Adapted from John Niven's darkly hilarious novel, Kill Your Friends is a delightful and bloody romp through the UK's music industry in the prime of Britpop in 1997. Nicholas Hoult plays the Patrick Bateman-esque A&R man Steven Stelfox who is always ruthlessly looking for the next big hit and lets nothing - and no-one - stand in his way. The comparisons, and fond homage to, American Psycho are there throughout as Stelfox dispatches of his rivals and gets a policeman on his tail and it's all done in the poorest, most wonderful taste possible. There's a strange pleasure from seeing James Corden's mess of an A&R character Waters get his head bashed in by the sneering, baby faced Stelfox - just as Jared Leto's Paul Allen was dispatched by Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman - don't hate on us for it.
At first you're worried Hoult won't be able to pull off the thoroughly repulsive Stelfox - he seems a wee bit too, well, nice. But he plays it with gusto and for laughs as we plough through the music industry set pieces of Midem in Cannes, South by Southwest, disposable groupies, heavy drugs use, talentless fodder to be shaped by labels and Stelfox's line of 'None of us know what we're doing'.
A tiny bit too long - the last 20 minutes could have been wrapped up neater - Kill Your Friends is badly behaved and brilliantly bitchy. There's great support from Craig Roberts as Stelfox's protegee Darren, Tom Riley as main A&R rival Parker-Hall and Dustin Demri-Burns as the unfortunate Schnieder.
3/5 I wanna suck yourrrrrrr...
Adapted from John Niven's darkly hilarious novel, Kill Your Friends is a delightful and bloody romp through the UK's music industry in the prime of Britpop in 1997. Nicholas Hoult plays the Patrick Bateman-esque A&R man Steven Stelfox who is always ruthlessly looking for the next big hit and lets nothing - and no-one - stand in his way. The comparisons, and fond homage to, American Psycho are there throughout as Stelfox dispatches of his rivals and gets a policeman on his tail and it's all done in the poorest, most wonderful taste possible. There's a strange pleasure from seeing James Corden's mess of an A&R character Waters get his head bashed in by the sneering, baby faced Stelfox - just as Jared Leto's Paul Allen was dispatched by Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman - don't hate on us for it.
At first you're worried Hoult won't be able to pull off the thoroughly repulsive Stelfox - he seems a wee bit too, well, nice. But he plays it with gusto and for laughs as we plough through the music industry set pieces of Midem in Cannes, South by Southwest, disposable groupies, heavy drugs use, talentless fodder to be shaped by labels and Stelfox's line of 'None of us know what we're doing'.
A tiny bit too long - the last 20 minutes could have been wrapped up neater - Kill Your Friends is badly behaved and brilliantly bitchy. There's great support from Craig Roberts as Stelfox's protegee Darren, Tom Riley as main A&R rival Parker-Hall and Dustin Demri-Burns as the unfortunate Schnieder.
3/5 I wanna suck yourrrrrrr...
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