Fwends Review: BFI London Film Festival 2025

Two old fwends reconnect in this Aussie indie comedy

Fwends is the debut feature from Australian film maker Sophie Somerville, made on a microbudget and shot guerilla style on the streets of Melbourne. Based on only the barest threads of a script, around ‘’99%’’ of the dialogue was improvised by the actors in this daring production that started shooting without any defined ending in mind. Somerville, and her cast, found it along the way.

Em (Emmanuelle Mattana) and Jessie (Melissa Gan) are old school friends who haven’t seen each other in several years when Em arrives in Melbourne to spend a weekend catching up. Em is a junior lawyer in Sydney, and slowly being demoralised by the job she has spent so long working to get. In counterpoint is Jessie, a former stripper and backpacker who works part time in a flower shop. She’s recently broken up with her boyfriend and has no idea where she is going in life. Though the two women may have been close as children, they couldn’t have grown in to more different adults.

Fwends follows the pair as they wander the city talking – in the mumblecore tradition there is little plot, but rather a 90-minute-long series of conversations as the two women dig deep on life, the universe and everything. Somerville perfectly captures the innate existential dread afflicting this generation, as conversations keep drifting back to climate change, capitalism and Em and Jessie’s feelings of loneliness and helplessness as young people in a world that constantly seems on the brink of catastrophy.

After a big falling out the two women take MDMA together and embark on a night of partying, mending their fences and getting to the bottom of their issues in a hazy, kaleidoscopic series of playful scenes.

The best improv shouldn’t feel like improv at all, and unfortunately that is not the case here. There are frequent moments where you can really see the cogs turning as the actors meander through these conversations and try to figure out where they’re going next. There are multiple moments are clearly meant to be jokes but are painfully, woefully unfunny, the energy being that of someone refusing to let go of a bit that just isn’t landing. A scene of the pair rapping into a voice changing microphone in particular drags on awkwardly, insufferably long.

The ‘deep and meaningful’ conversations are mostly surface level navel gazing, having the energy of those friends of yours who really think they’re on to something profound when chatting nonsense during a 5am come down, only to be regurgitating the blandest of statements. The characters are, unfortunately, pretty unlikeable.

The two actors don’t have the chemistry for us to believe that they were ever close friends – even ones who may have grown apart now. And while Somerville leaves us with final scenes that seem to hope to suggest Em and Jessie have recemented their bond – I was left with the surety that these would be two characters who would never see each other again. Though there is I suppose a crushing reality in that, the universal experience of losing close friends as we get older.

Native Melburnian’s I’m sure will get a kick out of Fwends – which does show a nice variety of the city and makes it seem like a beautiful place to live – and I’ve a great admiration for young indie film makers taking risks and putting truly different work out there. With better improv artists this could have been a better story, but Fwends ultimately commits one of the greatest sins in art. It’s just kinda boring?

Fwends is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival, wider release details have yet to be confirmed