REVIEW: ‘My Best Friend, His Girlfriend And Me’ Is All Mean And No Joy

It’s an interesting enough premise: two best friends who live together—one meets a girl, she hates the other friend, so they feud for his attention. My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me, a German-language Netflix original by Marco Petry and Janina Petry, is too tangled up in gender politics and weighed down by a relationship where you aren’t rooting for either side. It falls completely flat and offers only so much to endear you in between.

Olli (Kostja Ullmann) had no friends until Matze (David Kross) came along. They hardly spend a minute apart from then on. They even work at desks across from one another as adults. As adults, Olli is a party boy. He can’t take much seriously. When Rebecca (Janina Uhse) steps into their lives, Matze is smitten, and he and Rebecca quickly become an item. She, however, hates Olli and his childish ways.

The dynamic in My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me is utterly irritating.

Olli and Matze are supposed to go on a year-long trip around the world soon. They’ve been saving up for it forever. But Rebecca thinks it’s a bad idea and that it will be bad for her and Matze’s relationship. She moves in with Olli and Matze, and basically, she and Olli go to war over who gets to have Matze.

The dynamic in My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me is utterly irritating. If they’re not bickering, they’re on the verge of violence. If they’re not yelling at each other, they’re harshly and pretty unfairly judging one another. At no point does anybody consider sitting down and trying to get to know one another. You’re just supposed to go along with it as if it’s normal for two grown adults to be this immature. But worse, Olli and Rebecca are both just deeply unlikable, and neither of them is worth rooting for.

Olli is, in fact, a man-child, like he’s accused of being. But Rebecca is controlling and completely unfair to Olli. There’s no point in a big ugly feud if you don’t like either party. The antics aren’t fun, either. Teeth get dyed. A toaster gets set on fire. It’s nothing nearly as fun as the premise needs to make itself work.

My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me is messy and weak.

My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me has a few decent sentiments. It wants you to remember that you can’t stay young forever. But it also seems to want you to believe that there’s a binary choice to be made between friends and girlfriends. And that it’s normal for your girlfriend to completely control every aspect of your life. There’s another friend and wife whom Olli and Matze are friends with, where the wife doesn’t let him out of the house past 10 o’clock. But he declares that he loves having her as a wife, because she pushes him to be a better man.

My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me seems to imply that having a pushy wife that keeps you away from your friends is worth it, even if it means losing parts of yourself that you care about. It’s a pretty odd torch to carry for a movie where you’re supposed to be rooting for Olli, ultimately. But again, there’s nobody to root for at all, really. The movie is so twisted by a sense of ‘boys versus girls’ that you feel like you have to take a side, even though it’s also clear that neither side is meant to be fully right.

My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me is messy and weak. It’s too mean-spirited to have fun with its concept, and the dialogue falls flat whenever it tries making a point about what makes for good relationships and how to balance between friends and lovers.

My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me is now streaming, exclusively on Netflix.