Only Friends

The Bruises We Leave on Each Other

Queer television has carried a heavy, exhausting burden for the last decade. The pressure to present "positive representation." To show perfectly healthy, communicative couples who hold hands and dismantle prejudice with quiet dignity. I understand the impulse (we all want to see ourselves thrive), but honestly, it gets boring. People aren't always healthy. People are selfish, insecure and prone to making spectacularly bad decisions when they're twenty-something, bored, and lonely.

That brings us to *Only Friends*, a Thai series that gleefully tosses good behavior out the nearest window. Directed by Jojo Tichakorn Phukhaotong, the show follows a group of university students whose attempt to run a hostel together quickly devolves into a claustrophobic web of infidelity and shifting loyalties. As *Abstract AF!* noted in their review, it's an "entertaining drama that doesn't concern itself with presenting 'ideal characters,' instead serving up dollops of chaos". Tichakorn, openly gay himself, seems determined to explore the grayer, messier realities of modern queer hookup culture.



I've seen the "friends starting a business" trope a million times, but here, the hostel is just an incubator for resentment. The cinematography constantly emphasizes this claustrophobia. The camera lingers a little too long on shifting glances during group meetings. The lighting often bathes the actors in sickly, seductive neons that make everyone look vaguely sweaty and morally compromised.

Consider the mid-season confrontation in the kitchen. It starts as a mundane conversation about plumbing invoices, but you can feel the oxygen leaving the room. The camera stays stubbornly wide, forcing us to watch the physical distance between the actors close. Nobody yells. Instead, the dialogue drops to a venomous whisper and the tension shifts entirely to body language—white-knuckled grips on countertops, eyes that refuse to meet. You don't just watch the betrayal; you feel the stomach-drop of it.



The anchor in all this beautiful wreckage is Pirapat Watthanasetsiri. After years of playing stoic, self-sacrificing heroes—like his beloved turn as the grounded Chief Phupha in *A Tale of Thousand Stars*—his descent into a deeply flawed, emotionally messy character here feels genuinely shocking. His character starts with a veneer of control, but Pirapat lets that mask slip with microscopic precision. Watch the way he holds a glass at a party. His fingers tighten just before he tells a lie. His broad shoulders, usually a symbol of absolute reliability, slowly cave inward as the season progresses, painting a portrait of a man collapsing under the weight of his own desires.

Whether the show's unrelenting toxicity sustains itself across its twenty-four-episode run is something I'm still debating. Sometimes the backstabbing reaches a pitch that feels more like a soapy daytime drama than a psychological study. I kept needing a break after a few episodes, just to breathe some clean air.



But maybe that exhaustion is the point. *Only Friends* doesn't want you to feel comfortable. It asks us to look at the collateral damage of youth and admit that sometimes, the people who know us best are the ones best equipped to dismantle us. It hurts. And I couldn't look away.