With its potential for faux pas and clashing personalities, a dinner party is the ideal scenario for a comedy of manners. As Lee Haven Jones’s Welsh-language The Feast reveals, it’s also ripe for horror. Sure, the film shares any number of traits with such folk-horror cousins as Midsommar and The Wicker Man, but given Jones’s sharp eye for class friction, it can feel at times like a covert spiritual successor to The Rules of the Game.
A young woman, Cadi (Annes Elwy), shows up with wet hair at the gate to a modernist house of black brick plunked in the middle of the Welsh countryside. She’s been contracted for the evening to help the lady of the house, Glenda (Nia Roberts), orchestrate a three-course meal for her family and guests. As a local, Cadi couldn’t be more distinct from the house’s inhabitants, a family of wealth, power, and the foibles that come with it. The father, Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), is a proud alcoholic and member of Parliament. One of his sons, Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies), is a creeper triathlete, while the other, Guto (Steffan Cennydd), is a poseur-punk jonesing for heroin. As for Glenda, who grew up on the property when it was still a farm, she overcompensates for her humble background by treating Cadi like a scrap of mold.
Equipped with an otherworldly stare, Cadi hardly utters a word. Only Guto seems to notice, but he’s too preoccupied with scrounging up a fix to care very much. As night falls and dinner preparations proceed apace, the filmmakers wring dread from the situation with severe geometric compositions and slow motion, producing an atmosphere of drip-fed menace. A black, white, and acid-green color palette sets the house off sharply from its natural surroundings, while razor-sharp cuts and graphic matches shock and disorient. And through it all, the soundtrack oscillates between disturbing folk tunes and the ringing sounds of tinnitus.
Meanwhile, stains appear inexplicably on the tablecloth and Cadi’s blouse. A red feather falls from the ceiling of Glenda’s meditation room. Chekhov’s guns proliferate: knives, shish kebabs, axe heads, and the shotgun with which Gwyn claims to have shot the rabbits that they’re having for dinner (another nod to The Rules of the Game). All the while, Cadi looms, motionless and out of focus in the background By the time that Mair (Lisa Palfrey), a neighboring farmer, and Euros (Rhodri Meilir), Gwyn’s business consultant, arrive for dinner, it’s clear that something is off with Cadi. Tangles of her hair show up in the hors d’oeuvre, she retches in the rabbit dish, and her humming deafens Gwyn when he makes a pass at her.
But Jones presents the family as monstrous in their own mundane way: narcissistic, entitled, casually exploitative, sloppy when drunk, and, worst of all, smug about it. Even more despicable is Euros, with his gluttony not only hors d’oeuvre, but for the mineral deposits that he’s helping Gwyn to extract from the property (and looking to extract from Mair’s). As such, The Feast welds the folk and eco strands of horror, suggesting that these mining operations have released a vengeful spirit from beneath the hills. It’s a rare horror film that places the viewer’s sympathies so squarely with the monster, and without losing its power to horrify.
The Feast is a model of restraint in its first half, hinting at violence while spooling out the family’s vices and depravities inch by inch. However delectably grotesque in terms of visuals, the film’s second half can’t quite live up to this potential. Restraint goes out the window as the filmmakers resort to neat explanations that serve only to deflate the unease.
The violent set pieces are nothing if not imaginative, but as symbolic comeuppances for the victims’ sins they can feel forced, even moralizing. This is all the more disappointing because, when the film stops suggesting and starts stating outright, the horror dissipates without leaving any camp behind. That said, The Feast makes a stab at drawing out modern, very real anxieties around wealth disparity and ecological devastation without falling back on genre tropes, asking us to consider how the land itself may come to feast on the rich.
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