Whether starting or returning to Cambridge, the new academic year likely marks dealing with a sharp increase in social interactions. No longer trapped in your tiny bedroom, wondering how to get all the small blue tack patches out of your carpet (or other equally fascinating musings), you are now trying to make friends or re-establish relationships with people you haven’t seen in months. If the prospect of trying to make light conversation and not look uncomfortable all the time fills you with mild dread, then you aren’t alone. The new (ish) A24 film Friendship captures this dread perfectly.

You aren’t to blame if this movie (released in UK cinemas in July) passed you by. Next to James Gunn’s Superman, it’s difficult to argue that this off-putting film, starring Tim Robinson, was in fact the ‘film of the summer’. Yet, as a massive fan of Robinson and his comedic style, it was my most anticipated watch. While having a short stint on SNL, Robinson is most well-known for his surreal sketch comedy show, I Think You Should Leave.

“The film perfectly captures the experience of blindly attempting to navigate social cues, revealing how thin the line between social acceptability and error really is”

Each episode features around five or six sketches with premises ranging from an intervention at a Garfield-themed house to a hot dog-shaped car crashing into a shop window. It’s a show that revels in creating the most socially inappropriate situations and taking them to the extreme. Yet the bizarre premises never collapse into incomprehensible nonsense. While sometimes what is labelled as ‘absurdist comedy’ is just a tedious cacophony of different random noises and phrases, with ITYSL, there is always logic to the madness. There are always rules – ridiculous rules, but ones that the characters stubbornly cling to, which explain their behaviour, like the ‘Stable Stars’ owner who insists that his impersonators are allowed to hit people – but only ones under a specific price point! Tension (and humour) thus comes when the rules of the characters clash. It’s also, at times, a weirdly relatable show, with the characters often feeling like manifestations of all the worst anti-social impulses we repress, making them very cathartic to watch.

Despite my original suspicions, Friendship is not a prolonged ITYSL sketch. Tim Robinson didn’t even write it; rather, it is the brilliant directorial debut of Andrew DeYoung. Yet it was created with Robinson in mind, and in many ways feels like the logical next step in his comedy career. He plays a suburban dad who befriends a charismatic anchorman (played by Paul Rudd) only for this friendship to be abruptly cut short. It’s a much more ordinary story than most ITYSL sketches (no one is dressed up as a hot dog). Yet Robinson’s character (Craig) is still characteristically weird, just in more mundane ways. The way he shuffles around, his slightly too big coat, how he holds a cigarette, and how he announces that the new Marvel movie is ‘actually nuts’, feels like an alien doing a close, but still off, impersonation of a human.

“There is something existentially horrifying about someone liking you one minute and disliking you the next, without much you can do about it”

But then the experience of trying to make and then losing a friend can be very alienating, bound to make you question, ‘Is there something a bit off about me? ’ I can cringe at Craig’s over-the-top giddiness at his blossoming friendship, proclaiming to himself “I can see the future. And it’s full of pals”. But I am then forced to remember how I once daydreamed about being the maid of honour at someone’s wedding after one positive interaction, only to never really talk to them again. The film perfectly captures the experience of blindly attempting to navigate social cues, revealing how thin the line between social acceptability and error really is.

You can’t help but feel for Craig as he cries – “Ya’ll accepted me too fast. You can’t do that! You made me feel too free … People need rules!” But there are no real rules. And so while Craig’s antics after the friendship breakup are hilariously outlandish (licking toads, breaking into Austin’s house and losing your wife in the sewer), the feelings of desperation, shame and confusion he experiences feel genuine and are compelling to watch. There is something existentially horrifying about someone liking you one minute and disliking you the next, without much you can do about it. The film is able to take these depressing concepts and churn out brilliant comedy. At times, though, the film does struggle with pacing. ITYSL sketches tend to be around three or four minutes long. They don’t follow any tight formula; instead, they just abruptly start and end. Making a full-length movie with this style of comedy would inevitably be a bit tricky. Sometimes you feel the gaps between the jokes and wonder if the film will have the stamina to keep going. But ultimately, it reaches a satisfying ending and is thoroughly worth watching if you’ve ever felt like a bit of a freak trying to make a friend.