There's a mythology lurking beneath everything, from the family's own greed and manipulation to Cadi's own distracted, detached nature, but the film only ever tells you enough to get to the next reveal, and the effect is absolutely spellbinding.Īnd of course, like so many great horror films in this particular subgenre, this series of reveals, twists, and brutal payoffs is all layered over a deeper, more existential vein of horror. Jones and screenwriter Roger Williams take patient, confident, slow narrative steps to set up the horrors of this particular night in the country, and it all works because the filmmakers know exactly when to let a reveal drip out, and when to hold things back. What's actually going on here is, of course, better left to the viewer to find out as they watch the film, but what makes The Feast particularly effective is not just where it's willing to go, but how it goes there. It might be Cadi or it might be something else, but the feast becomes about more than just putting on a show around a dinner table. As the sun goes down and the guests arrive, even more dysfunction creeps into the picture, and it becomes clear that something is very wrong. Enter Cadi (a hypnotic Annes Elwy), who arrives quietly and dutifully and gets to work even as family dysfunction continues to creep in around the edges. It's an important night, a night of indulgence and plying others with food and drink, which is why they need a local girl to assist in serving the meal. An influential and wealthy family lives there - two parents trying to appear as sophisticated and powerful as possible, two sons trying to take what they can while they can - and on this particular night, they're hoping to grow even more influential and wealthy with the help of a trusted friend. The Feast takes place at an estate in the Welsh countryside where a sleek, cold, modern mansion has replaced a farmhouse. Instead, the film goes deeper - and darker - and the result is a future folk-horror classic about what happens when the people who feel entitled to everything finally end up taking too much. There's a lot of great genre fare at the festival this year, from Barbara Crampton's darkly comic blood-fest Jakob's Wife to South African bio-horror gem Gaia.Įven among other standouts, The Feast got under my skin because it could have stuck with that baseline dinner party dread and still worked quite well. That menace forms the baseline of an exquisite sense of dread bubbling up through every frame of The Feast, director Lee Haven Jones' Welsh horror film that just premiered at this year's SXSW. I mean stuffy, staged, at least half the people at the table have an Agenda dinner parties, the ones that are all about congratulating each other on the food and smiling awkwardly across the table, ducking the tension hovering in the room right up until the moment someone decides to say what they really came here to say. I don't mean those nights when you get together with your friends to have a fun meal, either. Certain dinner parties just carry an inherent layer of menace.
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