Few films outside the horror genre understand how to inhabit the grotesque: Your Friends and Neighbours (Neil LaBute, 1998; pictured above) is one such rarity. But, if the supernatural isn’t scary enough, maybe houses haunted by loveless inhabitants are. A cinematic break-up can be one of the most cathartic or agonising experiences, but the complete destruction of several relationships between the most annoying and selfish people imaginable is just as insufferable and magnetic. American ilmmaker Neil LaBute specializes in this kind of torture, often writing characters so twisted in their treatment of romantic partners he himself has been deemed a true misanthrope. His first film, In the Company of Men (1997), defies the notion that sticks and stones do the most damage because words can certainly hurt. But, there are a few elements of his sophomore work, Your Friends and Neighbours, released a year later, that strike a much crueler chord.

In Your Friends and Neighbours, LaBute constructs an ensemble of illusive personhood. The characters are gorged on hubris, bereft of humanity. Their names are never uttered in the film and laughable when read in the credits. Haughty theater professor Jerry (Ben Stiller), self-serving stockbroker Barry (Aaron Eckhart), and their diametrically opposed writer wives Terri (Catherine Keener) and Mary (Amy Brenneman). Rounding out the cast is residential man-slut Cary (Jason Patric) and peripheral mistress and artist’ assistant Cheri (Nastassja Kinski). Set in an affluent area in the ’90s, they are comfortable in their status but struggle to find ease between the sheets. Terri hates how much Jerry talks in bed. Mary can’t connect with Barry sexually. And Cary berates every woman with whom he sleeps. The cynicism of 1990s cinema has remained ripe for study; it’s the turn of the century, and everybody is disillusioned.

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I can’t get no satisfaction

When Terri learns that Jerry and Mary have begun an affair, she begins her own sexual excursion with Cheri. But, no satisfaction comes from any of these relationships. Like LaBute’s debut feature, masculinity is at the crux of the narrative, as the men in the film insist on being the arbiters of heartbreak. One may hurt in favour of self-preservation, but when hurt is enacted against them, it is a moral fallout on the women’s behalf. While Cary is the most obvious and destructive personification of such narcissism, Jerry represents the disingenuous academic side, speaking the film’s thesis to the audience – literally, he is on stage lecturing to his students – in his first scene: “Lace and language aside, it’s just men and women. Just like any other story, like every story”.

Your Friends and Neighbours lingers on the edge of this obvious form of storytelling, having its characters say exactly what the movie wants them to to capture the illusions of grandeur these men cling to. But interjecting this gendered set-up is Terri. Enter Catherine Keener, the standout of the film and, in my queer though not at all biased opinion, one of cinema’s most magnificent heartbreakers. Introduced while being awkwardly penetrated by a sweaty, charmless Jerry, she postcoitally slams his ego and admits she isn’t enjoying herself. The only moments in which the brazenness of the film’s dialogue falls flat is when wielded as arrogant attempts at machismo. Only Terri, who possesses a true edge, can pierce through the plot.

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A woman-eat-woman world

Keener thrives with the frequent dryness of her filmic personas that do not undercut her sexuality but define it. The skilful way her smile can oscillate between desire and ulterior motives, the fry of a voice that can inspire passion and hide deception. In 1999, a year after Your Friends and Neighbours released, Keener starred as Maxine in Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), another tale of troubling relationship dynamics. Keener’s ability to navigate cold women is essential to her allure. One comment on the trailer for her 2001 film Lovely & Amazing (Nicole Holofcener, 2001) reads, the “ ‘castrating bitch’ persona she demonstrates in nearly every film she’s in, including this one, has grown weary.” In both her films and real life, Keener is shamed for emasculating men by operating within stereotypically masculine spaces.

Throughout the film, Terri’s gender is mocked; Cary refers to her as “a touch unfeminine” and a “dyke bitch,” attacking her sexuality. Terri is unlike Mary, who struggles to even say the word “fuck,” their differences hallmarked when Jerry is attracted to Mary’s softer attitude. Terri exists in a liminal space, not quite fitting into the boxes of gender the other characters represent. Regardless of how desensitised she comes across, Terri is still a woman hurt to find her husband cheating. Tearing up Camus on the carpet, the book where Mary writes her number for Jerry, Terri cries in anger. “It’s a sickness, all of it… Relationships. Caring. Love’s a disease” says Terri to Cheri.

Terri’s queerness is not tainted by the fact that this affair may not be happily ever after. It’s noteworthy how, like Maxine in Being John Malkovich, Terri finds solace, if temporary, in a queer relationship. The characters’ journeys speak to heterosexual frustration and boredom, in which “cold” women find less resistance from other women who don’t feel threatened or in competition with their candidness. Terri’s queerness, alongside her curt nature, makes her refusal to offer cinematic poetry to her and Jerry’s divorce that much more powerful. When Jerry and Terri discuss their marriage over lunch, Terri commands the exchange, denying Jerry any kind of dramatic wisdom about their infidelities and her queerness. “If we could’ve come back together and continued, then it would’ve been very sweet, but we can’t. We fucked it. We fucked up… This is not some fucking thesis… Grow the fuck up”.

Unlike the men in the film, who insist on delivering pretentious wit on relationships and gender that are a little too on the nose, Terri delivers it effortlessly and authentically. For mean women on screen, “nice” is boring, and the hottest women have no interest in being boring or placating the men who hurt them. However meaningless the divorce itself is to Terri and Jerry, the significance of how it is conducted is fascinating, though fleeting. LaBute rejects any sort of heroism for Terri, who winds up just as jaded and hardened as the men. In their final scene together, Cheri begs Terri to answer her, but Terri weaponises the silence she so desperately craves against the person she claims to love. Her razor words have been spent on stupid men and the sides of tampon boxes, and there are no more left to devote to affection or reassurance. In Your Friends and Neighbours, men talk too much, and women become sexually inert.

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Upon Closer inspection

These characters weave in and out of self-affliction in an immorality tale, elucidating the indifference of those who reject introspection and transformation even as their marriages deteriorate. Dialogue is essential to illustrating the romantic and sexual politics between romantic partners. Hollywood remembers iconic lines like “Here’s looking at you, kid” or “You had me at hello.” So, when the use of language is flipped to extract the ego in humanity, oozing wretchedness rather than wisdom, it feels like an even stronger betrayal. “Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood” in Closer (Mike Nichols, 2004; pictured just above) or “Why is it that your cunt is like, and I don’t like to use that word, but, goddamnit, it’s like your vagina is seemingly tied to my mouth” said by Jerry in this film are perfect foils to these romantic declarations. Your Friends and Neighbours feels like a precursor to Closer, its nascent tether unafraid to be darker and more tormented.

Like LaBute’s theatre origins, Closer was conceived by a playwright, Patrick Marbler, but where the film Closer offers a glimmer of hope, changing the fate of its lead female character, LaBute avoids such compassion through Mary.. In one of the most cynical, desperate final scenes, Mary winds up divorced and pregnant with Cary’s child. It’s a ruthless choice by LaBute to illustrate something greater than a rock bottom: a callous abyss from which one cannot escape. Every person ends lonelier than they began. Though Mary seems to be the only person who mourns her past relationship in some way, it is too late and useless, like wearing a broken watch.

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Wear your filth on your sleeve

Your Friends and Neighbours’ intrigue does not solely rest upon dialogue. The distance or total absence of the women Cary seduces before becoming angry and hateful toward them allows his evil to emanate off him and suffocate the screen, forcing any woman privy to it to her absolute edge. The slow push in on Cary’s face as he shares his gruesome perspective of a schoolyard sexual assault he committed. The refusal to actually capture the elusive painting all of the characters, except Mary, admire in the art gallery. The film is in a constant game of denial, depriving the audience of anything remotely rewarding and only offering clarity on what will further obliterate the viewer’s spirit.

Neil Labute’s sophomore feature is unapologetically putrescent, a film stuffed so far in the back of the fridge you forgot it was there, and now it has stunk up the entire enclosure. Each character is so solipsistic they will likely never come to understand what it means to love another person, let alone reckon with what it means to lose them. Though the heartbreak may not lie within the contents of its script or camera, it burrows beyond, within the spectators who cannot change the story. One is left to grieve humanity, wondering if all the best parts have been sanded down to sex and semiotics.