Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Feast’ on VOD, a Welsh Horror Tale That Unfolds During a Doomed Dinner Party

Now on VOD, The Feast is a Welsh-language thriller that hopes to slow-burn its way into our hearts — assuming our hearts are cool with arthouse-horror flourishes and an unsettling lingering creeping dreadly deadly sinking feeling of inevitable fetishy violence. And whose heart ISN’T cool with arthouse-horror flourishes and an unsettling, lingering, creeping, deadly sinking feeling of inevitable fetish-y violence, I always say? The movie is the feature debut of director Lee Haven Jones, who may just nudge into the growing pantheon of horror auteurs.

THE FEAST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: She shows up at the rural fortress-home looking a little damp, but you’ll think nothing of it. Cadi (Annes Elwy) arrives at this ultramodern house where obviously rich people live, to help Glenda (Nia Roberts) prep for a dinner party. She’s officially The Help, but who will be crying for help at the end of the day? No spoilers! It soon becomes prevalent that Glenda and her family are insufferable assholes with some serious dysfunctions tooling around in their skulls. She has her own isolation chamber where she gets away from it all, a dim-lit brick room that one of the dinner guests accurately describes as being “like a cell.” Her husband is Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), a Parliament member (strike one) who likes to brag about shooting rabbits for dinner (strike two) even though he just found them dead and didn’t really kill them (strike three).

It stands to reason that Gwyn and Glenda would have chips off the old blocks. Guto (Steffan Cennydd) is somewhat sympathetic for this crew, a heavily bracelet’ed bad guitar player who’s moved home to kick his heroin habit. His brother Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies) has the serial-killer vibe, a hairless shrew of a person who’s training for a triathlon and really, really, really likes to admire and touch himself while wearing a skintight jumpsuit. This family is a bunch of CREEPS. And yes, I’m sure you also noticed that their names all start with the same letter. That doesn’t acquit them, not in the least.

Their pronounced weirdness means Cadi’s unsettling silent staring and disquieting ability to sing scary old songs just blends in with the psychological fixtures in this place. She kinda spies on everyone — especially Gweirydd, who she eyeballs as he shaves his nethers and a drop of blood plops in the bathwater. She likes to touch everybody’s shit, wet her finger with her tongue to clean a smudged glass that someone else is going to pick up and put their mouth on, and leave big wads of her hair in the canapes. Eventually, all two of the dinner guests arrive to have the type of conversations that render the movie a critique of capitalism — something to do with the opening scene in which a probing drill relentlessly plunges itself into the land. Meanwhile, we’ve been wrestling with some serious build-up, complete with flashes of odd behavior that’s even odder than the behavior I’ve already described, and glimpses of gore, or maybe it’s just the eviscerated pomegranates, all of which points to the depiction of some serious squick.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Feast is sort of Yorgos Lanthimos Semi-Lite — maybe The Killing of a Sacred Deer on a tighter budget. Also, between this, Gaia and Pig, the mushroom is making a significant cinematic comeback in 2021.

Performance Worth Watching: It’d be too easy to highlight Davies or Elwy for their ability to stoke unspoken menace with a body language or an empty stare. Roberts enjoys the slightly more complex role as the matriarchal head-of-household who seems to look the other way when the men in her life behave badly — and also may be a conduit for any supernatural earthy feminine wiles the plot brews on the back burner.

Memorable Dialogue: “After you’ve taken everything, what will be left?”

Sex and Skin: You won’t be shocked to learn that the film features a disturbing (non-nude) sex scene, and I’d really rather not get into it here.

Our Take: As The Feast teases us with a quiet litany of disconcerting moments, the hope is that it rewards our patience with a decent payoff. I think it does, for the most part anyway, despite Jones drawing close stylistic comparison to Lanthimos, Robert Eggers and Lynne Ramsay. His pacing is deliberate and methodical; he wrings anxiety and ominousness from the setting; he flirts with body and folk horror tropes as his characters indulge their sins, as in “seven deadly,” and primarily lust, gluttony, pride and greed. The film isn’t just a shallow flirtation with trepidatious atmosphere — it makes some obvious, but reasonably intriguing ecological overtures via a Mother-Earth-gets-her-revenge plot that’s rich with suggestion, but also prone to shrugging vagueness.

When the film indulges a detail or two, it’s bleakly amusing — the loathsome, morally corrupt family in this story decimates the gorgeous countryside surrounding the house in a quest for wealth, but also grows its own sage right outside the door, and built their ugly, menacing modern home using as many “local” materials as possible. How noble! The key takeaway here is, don’t do anything to incite the planet to send one of her hard, pipe-hitting goons after you, which is something we already knew, but hearing the message again never hurt anyone, right?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Jones shows some vision and even greater potential with The Feast, which is a rock-solid arthouse-horror outing.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Feast