A title like “That Friend” already tells you the movie has arrived with a familiar problem in tow. You know the person. The one who turns “just one drink” into a lost weekend, treats boundaries like decorative suggestions, and somehow leaves everyone else dealing with the emotional cleanup. The archetype is so worn-in that a film built around it has to decide quickly whether it wants to be loose and funny, safe and cutesy, or full Stifler with a rideshare account.
Alex Wall and Will Sterling‘s “That Friend” lands somewhere in the middle, which isn’t a bad place for it to be. The film doesn’t reinvent the drug-fueled buddy comedy, and some of its jokes wobble right into cornball territory. But it has enough energy, warmth, and performer chemistry to get by on charm, even when the script is doing that familiar indie-comedy thing where chaos arrives wearing a big grin and begging to be loved.
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The Friend Who Won’t Leave
Henry (Josh Brener) is trying to have a romantic Palm Springs weekend with his girlfriend Penny (Billie Lourd). The plan is simple: relax, reconnect, maybe figure out where the relationship is heading. Then there’s Paul (Harvey Guillén), Henry’s old friend and former frat brother, who joins the ride from Los Angeles and, when his own plans collapse, ends up crashing the getaway.
Paul is “that friend” in the loudest possible sense. He’s the guy who never met a substance he couldn’t overuse, a moment he couldn’t overcomplicate, or a social cue he couldn’t barrel straight through. He brings along drug-laced cigarettes, because apparently ruining a couples’ weekend needed a garnish, and before long the trio is chasing after the fallout across the desert.
The premise isn’t fresh. It belongs to a long line of comedies about the exhausting friend, the uptight straight man, and the weekend that mutates into a stress rash. “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” “The Hangover,” “Due Date,” “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle”—you can feel the ancestry. What helps That Friend is that it doesn’t go as grotesque or as glossy as some of those films. It’s smaller, scrappier, and more recognizably awkward. The disaster here doesn’t feel like movie-world chaos as much as the kind of weekend someone might one day describe with, “You had to be there,” even though everyone involved clearly wishes they hadn’t been.
In its own scruffy way, the film also nudged me toward “Hey Viktor!“: another comedy about arrested development, self-mythologizing, and the awkward business of realizing that “growing up” doesn’t always mean becoming more interesting. “That Friend” is much lighter and more openly farcical, but both films understand how immaturity can become a personality, then a prison, then a problem everyone else has to live around.
‘That Friend’ is Personified Chaos With a Soft Center
Guillén is the movie’s engine, and the performance walks a very narrow ledge. Paul has to be irritating enough for Henry’s frustration to make sense, but not so unbearable that the audience starts quietly rooting for him to be abandoned near a rest stop. Guillén mostly pulls it off. He gives Paul a big, messy neediness that turns his worst impulses into something more complicated than selfishness. He isn’t just wild for the sake of being wild. He’s terrified of becoming optional.
Brener gives Henry the right exasperated, pinched quality. He plays him like a man who has mistaken growing up for becoming tastefully annoyed by everyone else. That’s why the friendship works better than the premise initially suggests. Paul is a lot, yes, but Henry isn’t innocent. His judgment comes dressed as maturity, and the film is sharpest when it notices that adult friendships don’t always end because one person changes and the other doesn’t. Sometimes they weaken because both people have grown into versions of themselves they don’t know how to explain to each other.
Lourd, meanwhile, gives Penny enough warmth and patience to keep her from becoming just the girlfriend stuck between two men acting like emotional potholes. Miles Gutierrez-Riley also gives the film a needed jolt as Spencer, one of those supporting characters who seems to wander in from another movie and improve this one by sheer force of oddball timing.
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A Feel-Good Movie, Rough Patches and Corny Jokes and All
The comedy itself is more uneven. The drug-trip material depends on how much mileage one still gets from people stumbling through public places under questionable substances, and my tolerance for that can run out fast. A few bits feel unnecessary, and some deliveries could use a sharper snap. The ending also softens the edges a little too neatly, as if the film suddenly remembers it wants to be generous after spending most of its time lighting emotional furniture on fire.
Still, “That Friend” is easy to like. You can sense Wall and Sterling having fun, not in a smug way, but in the way a comedy sometimes radiates the pleasure of people making each other laugh. That doesn’t excuse every weak gag, but it helps. Under the raunch, the benders, and the corny jokes, the film understands something real about friendship: outgrowing someone isn’t always the same as becoming better than them. Sometimes maturity means figuring out whether the person who drives you insane still belongs in your life, and whether the version of yourself they remember is someone you’re too embarrassed to admit you miss.
Alex Wall and Will Sterling‘s “That Friend“ had its world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Festival in the Spotlight Narrative competition. The festival takes place on June 3-14, 2026. Follow us for more coverage.
