ROBIN WILDE
Your Friends Close
14
I
t would be hard to be
accused of courting
controversy by asserting that video game
movies haven’t been
blessed with success.
Whether it was Uwe
Boll’s baffling run of
adaptations in the early 2000s, or mediocre
efforts like Silent Hill,
the last gaming film
to attract any kind of
passion was the Super
Mario Bros. Movie.
Your Friends Close,
though, is a different
beast. It’s not about the
games as much as the
people behind them and though the titular
fictional title is central
to the plot, it makes
barely an appearance.
In fact, the setting
and plot are almost
mundane. Jason, a
talented but egotistical show-off and Becca, his hard working
but insecure wife, are
two developers on
the up and up, their
talent squarely in the
crosshairs of Randall
Sconce, a gaming
legend of a Peter Molyneux-esque level of
Kovar McClure and Heather Anne
Wood in Your Friends Close (2013)
ambition.
They are hosting a
going away party the
night before leaving for
Paris for six months to
work on Your Friends
Close, a highly competitive game and
social media hybrid
in which players can
collaborate with one
another or betray their
friends to achieve their
goal.
The focus of the film
is not the game but
the effect it has on the
partygoers. All deeply flawed and in their
own way unlikeable,
as the film progresses we see nuance in
all of them behind the
naked ambition. After
an opening in the Paris
job becomes available
- and hats begin to be
thrown into the ring some unlikely alliances
and conversations are
set in motion.
In truth, the first two
acts proceed as an exercise in uncomfortable
tension and domestic
unhappiness, before
the denouement in act
three when well known
game critic Yahtzee
Croshaw makes his ap-
pearance as the comical but sinister artificial
intelligence, Phillip.
The single-house setting might have been a
budgetary constraint,
but it's one which is
well integrated into
the plot. The relatively small setting forces
together
conflicting
egos, and the clash
of the big dreams and
endless ambition of
these creatives with a
relatively mundane setting is tough to watch,
but impossible to pull
away from.
The quality of the
writing improves as
the film progresses, but
it starts from a disappointing place, with the
opening moments being nothing but exposition establishing the
plot. Given the film’s
running time of 80 minutes, it isn’t as though
they risked running
over into a three hour
epic, so it’s a shame
we weren’t held in
more suspense than we
already are.
The writing may fluctuate, but there are
some definite spikes in
the signal. Your Friends
Close is a film which
knows its audience,
and doesn’t feel the
need to patronise with
its gaming references.
The blue and orange Portal shots are
brought into view, but
not brought up or explained because in
universe and in the
audience, people get
the joke without it being spoon fed. Though
jokes about a cat called
Meowtroid Prime might
come across a little forced, most of us