There was a song once that claimed "this says nothing to me about my life." Maybe Neil LaBute knows the characters (and they are very much characters) who populate his second feature. And maybe Your Friends & Neighbours says much to him about his life. If it does then he has my sympathy. A more petty, self-gratifying, self-absorbed cabal you couldn't hope to meet outside of the worst of Woody Allen. Indeed, this is a film populated almost exclusively by variations on the titular foul-mouthed misanthrope the Woodman essayed in his last, the foul-mouthed and misanthropic Deconstructing Harry. And I'm not too sure that's a recommendation.

This is the kind of movie where everyone is fucking - literally and metaphorically - everyone else. People - six characters; they don't have names, not until the perfunctory Mary, Barry, Terri, Cheri, Cary, Jerry of the credits - who appear to lead the lives of precious, sophisticated, self-defined upper-middle class aesthetes and intellectuals. Fucking - literally and metaphorically - for them is a game of intellectual rigour rather than specific enjoyment. Almost. A lesbian affair at least seems to have some emotional fire, and, for all he's a monstrous, muscle-bound shit, Jason Patric at least uses sex to his own ends: as weapon ("a revenge fuck") or performance art. His is the life to which the other two men aspire, his court to which they come for enlightenment.

Which brings us neatly to the film's literal centrepiece. Which is odd, since you would come expecting it to be the - feel-bad - highlight. It's when the buds swap "best fuck" stories. Patric's was the high school gang-rape of a male classmate. His friends are surprised but impressed. It should be chilling but it's not. Maybe it's because Patric is such a cunt, or maybe it's LaBute's prosaic framing, but it's more likely to raise laughs than a sharp intake of breath. In fact, it's Patric's bathroom hygiene instructions the end that are arresting. LaBute has fucked us, his audience, so much that nothing bed-bound is about to shock anyone.

Your Friends & Neighbours lacks the emotional sadism of LaBute's debut, In The Company of Men, perhaps because it tries too hard. If we fail to engage with these people from the off then one or all could turn out baby-rapers and we'd yawn and turn over. But it's all theatre and journalism and galleries and wondering why Patric has a weird, raised bed. It's more marvelling at why Ben Stiller looks like David Mamet than anything he does with his dick. Aaron Eckhart and Amy Brenneman are just wet. Only Catherine Keener and, especially, Nastasja Kinski are vaguely sympathetic. And that might just be because they give the film's best performances.

Your Friends & Neighbours is one of those films you can only approach from a personal standpoint. And from a personal standpoint, it leads nowhere. In The Company of Men was vicious and mean-spirited to an end, but this new one is simply misanthropic bile for its own sake. And LaBute's medium-shot, static camera style just adds to the detachment; we are being invited to look and not engage. Unlike the put-upon deaf woman in that first film, we could care less if one or any or all of this lot walk out of their carefully appointed minimalist apartments tomorrow and is hit by a truck. I don't know these people and I don't know the lives they lead, and neither do you. And more pointedly, nor do we care.