Review of Kill Your Friends

'Kill Your Friends' (2015) is adapted from author, John Niven's best-selling novel, and the director, Owen Harris's admittedly darkly humorous take on it strikes a bloodily ambivalent tone right from the off. The satirical black comedy luridly lampooning the self-serving internecine machinations within the music industry, in this especially colourful, dizzily day-glow instance, the ostensibly halcyon-era of Britpop, that mop-headed epoch of plangent, paisley-hued Rickenbacker guitars, blissfully Byrdsian barnetry and foul, incongruently voluminous trews, where the absurdly polemical NME & Sounds took entrenched positions on who should be the victorious, top-Brit-Popper of the week, Suede or Gay Dad, weekly unleashing their splendidly vicious, bipartisan spleen to a largely indifferent world. Curiously we glean little new from the film, since it had always been plainly obvious that those venal, self-serving swine working within the unholy, drug-cloistered walls of the record industry had about as much practical insight on music as Count Dracula had upon the wholly imagined nuances of French wine, and while the vacillating tone is an irksome one, fitfully slipping in and out of amusingly acerbic comedy and then plunging deep into nihilistic splatter vernacular with all the subtlety of a hyperbolic Benny Hill skit, it is this very unpredictability that endows the film with its not inconsiderable charm! So, to recap, music industry bad, music industry people worse, so far, do redundant; but the sparkling, bon-mottled script does have some witheringly dry repartee, those malefic dilettantes of 'Unigram' records frequently spouting some eminently quotable banter in plentiful moments of spleen-venting angst. The nimble electronic score by Junkie X is mostly useful, keeping the febrile narrative bouncing along nicely, and all the performances are well-rounded, featuring an especially exhilarating, demonic turn from ascending star, Nicholas Hoult as the sinisterly scheming, disarmingly cherubic, wholly diabolic, Steven Stelfox, who outwardly looks as though milk wouldn't curdle in his stomach, and yet, fulminating despotically behind that sparse bum fluff roils the power-lusting, vastly murderous, glacial will of a maniacally duplicitous Conservative MP. Horror fans may balk at the lack of explicit gore, comedy fans may find the morbid lapses into slasher territory distasteful, but those singularly twisted individuals who can readily appreciate more fevered, quixotic fare might well savour Steven Stelfox's psychotic pragmatism, relishing his asinine ascent to the top of the music biz, by hook or by crook, and by every double-dealing, twist-headed trick in the book!