Five (2016)
Directed by Igor Gotesman
No — Five is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Five arrives from France in 2016 with the confidence of a film that has studied its American betters and taken diligent notes.
Consciousness Markers
The friend group includes a Black character (Nestor, played by Idrissa Hanrot) alongside a mixed ensemble, but this is natural, unremarked casting in a French hangout comedy rather than a deliberate representation agenda.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear in this drug-and-sex buddy comedy.
The film trades heavily in crass, below-the-belt humor and leering sex gags, with no feminist framing whatsoever.
Race is never a subject of the film; the diverse cast exists without any commentary on racial identity or injustice.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
Critics (Les Inrocks) attacked the film for its consumerism and celebration of a lavish lifestyle, making it if anything pro-consumption rather than anti-capitalist.
No body-positivity themes; the humor leans on conventional physical gags.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film is a contemporary fictional comedy with no historical subject matter to revise.
A fast-paced stoner comedy modeled on The Hangover and Superbad, it delivers gags rather than moral instruction.
Why it received this score
Five arrives from France in 2016 with the confidence of a film that has studied its American betters and taken diligent notes. Igor Gotesman's comedy follows five childhood friends who move into a costly Paris apartment and fund the arrangement by selling marijuana, a premise borrowed wholesale from The Hangover and Superbad and reassembled with a Gallic shrug. The Hollywood Reporter observed that the film dishes out sex, drugs and hip-hop with enthusiasm, and there is little reason to dispute the inventory. It moves quickly, which is its chief defense against scrutiny.
For those of us who spend our evenings cataloguing the ideological weather of contemporary cinema, Five is a barren field. The friend group includes a Black character, Nestor, played by Idrissa Hanrot, but the film never pauses to remark upon him, which is to say the casting is casual and unthemed. The humor is leering and below the belt, and the women in the frame exist largely as targets of it. Race is not a subject. The environment is not a subject. The characters' appetites for expensive living are celebrated, not interrogated, a point Les Inrocks made with some irritation when it accused the film of naked consumerism. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moral instruction of any kind. The film wants to make you laugh at a joke about anatomy and then move on.
This is, in its way, a relief and a void in equal measure. Five is a hangout comedy with nothing on its mind beyond the next gag, and it succeeds and fails entirely on that modest ambition. We file it accordingly, with a clean conscience and a weary pen.
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Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
A young man paying the rent for himself and his lifelong friends ends up flat-broke and resorts to selling marijuana to pay the bills – only to get caught up in the dangerous world of drugs.
Questions about Five
Is Five woke?
No — Five is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Five have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 15.
How does Five compare to other 2016 movies?
It ranks #202 of the 285 films from 2016 we've scored; their average is 16. The wokest is 13th (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.