New Year’s Eve. A time for Best Friends™ to gather ‘round and learn Big Important Truths™ about themselves and each other. Or, in the case of The Truth About You, a time for irredeemably horrible people to say horrible things about each other in the name of “friendship” and “honesty” when it’s really a way to make themselves feel better about their own self-absorbed smugness.
So it goes in Andrea Fellers’s screechingly awful debut. For reasons that are never fully illuminated, six friends (all white and almost all straight save for a token flamboyant gay male character) decide that their annual New Year’s party is a good opportunity to play a game of their own devising, improbably called “One Thing I’ve Always Wanted to Tell You That I Hoped You Would Find Out For Yourself.” Acting in ways that no recognizably adult human has ever acted, they end up telling the conventionally attractive, average-sized Tashi (Kasia Pilewicz) that she is “20 pounds overweight”; that the hard-partying, hard-drinking Holly (Aimee-Lynn Chadwick) is an alcoholic; that the musician Brett (Jon Robert Hall) is actually a terrible singer and songwriter; and other shocking revelations too mind-numbingly stupid to list here.
This is a tone-deaf pastiche of emotional honesty that mistakes empty maliciousness for biting comedy. The script reads as though it was written as a teenager’s fantasy of how grown-up relationships work. If The Truth About You is structured around a game, then the characters are mere game-pieces, manipulated into whatever shape the plot needs them to be at the time. Holly’s alcoholism is alternately tragic or humorous, depending on the mood of the scene. Ditziness is a trait that gets passed around from person to person, so no weak punchline goes unexpressed; for example, a running joke about misunderstanding “succubus” as “sucks a bus,” which starts a chain reaction of misnomers like “bus sucker,” “how many busses has she sucked,” and other similarly clever instances of verbal wit.
By the end of the film’s 88-minute runtime, romantic relationships have been shattered and rebuilt, friendships tested, and our patience with this nonsense stretched to its breaking point. At one point, Holly, with her heavily made-up Avril Lavigne-style mascara running down her cheeks, skin glowing with the washed-out sheen of a bad Instagram filter, reaffirms their group’s affection for one another. “I love us,” she says to their rag-tag gang of thoroughly unsympathetic pawns. Surely, she’s the only one.
