The Feast

Directed by Lee Haven Jones

Running time: 1hr33 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Annes Elwy stars in The Feast

Dinner parties can, at least on occasion, be pleasant, benignly sociable evenings of good friends and good food — though you wouldn’t know it from the movies, where almost without exception, any such invitation augurs, at best, a grimly discomfiting evening for the guests, and at worst, their last one of any description.

From the tense, tetchy opening beats of The Feast, a slyly confident and unabashedly nasty updated folk-horror from Welsh first-time feature director Lee Haven Jones, you just know this one is going to wind up on the harsher end of the spectrum. The hostess, brittle social climber Glenda (Nia Roberts), is uptight and unpleasant; her wealthy MP husband Gwyn (Julian Lewis) a contemptible, rifle-toting blowhard; hostile, parentally-aggravated dysfunction practically radiates from their two adult sons (Steffan Cennydd and Sion Alun Davies). You feel sorry for the guests before you even know who they are: the most sympathetic presence here is Cadi (Annes Elwy), Glenda’s gawky, taciturn hired help, but there’s something disconcertingly off about her, too.

From the grubby trail of earth that Cadi leaves in her wake wherever she goes, smearing the engineered wood floors and pristine table linens of Glenda and Gwyn’s expensively angular new-build house in the hilly, remote patch of Wales where the former grew up, you can hazard a guess as to where she’s coming from, or going to. The Feast doesn’t trade in Shyamalan-style twists and surprises; rather, it’s an expression of regional rage that swells from the ground up, growing ever more riotously bloody and operatic with each exactingly prepared course, lashing out at the gentrified new money encroaching on every corner of rural Britain. (Roger Williams’ sharp, sparse script is, of course, defiantly delivered in the Welsh language throughout — even if you suspect that Gwyn and Glenda, who now treat their homeland like a holiday retreat, would have left that tongue long behind.)

The pleasure lies in the gleaming wit and Grand Guignol bravado of its execution, as Haven Jones honours the simple, mythic roots of the folk-horror genre while confronting audiences with lavishly grotesque imagery and sleek violence plucked from newer strains of cinema. At this doomed, ambitiously planned dinner, not every modern infusion is unwelcome.

THE FEAST (2021) Written by Roger Williams | Shot by Bjørn Ståle Bratberg | Edited by Kevin Jones

In cinemas now.