You are invited to “The Feast,”Lee Haven Jones’ feature film debut is about a family from the upper crust whose dinner plans are disrupted by unspeakable acts. And that’s just the part where they try to rope you into a moneymaking scheme.
Relax, it gets worse.
Set against the backdrop of Welsh folklore (not that they’ll explain much of it), “The Feast” is an efficient, stark story about bad people getting what’s coming to them. Or perhaps words like “efficient”And “stark”These are only a few ways to say it. “straightforward”And “simplistic.”
A young woman named Cadi (Annes Elwy, BBC’s “Little Women”) approaches a newly remodeled house in the Welsh countryside where she’s expected to help prepare a three-course meal for a small family and their dinner guests. It’s not a big job, and frankly, there isn’t much for Cadi to do other than set the table and skewer some vegetables. Nobody seems to notice when she runs off to spy on the residents, and it’s easy to overlook that she sometimes leaves traces of phantom mud behind her.
Glenda Roberts (Nia), is the mother. “Washington”), is from the country and not especially proud of it. Her husband Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones, “Justice League”() is a member, but not a respected one, of Parliament. Their eldest son Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies, “Hidden”Although he’s training for a triathlon, he treats his tight spandex mostly as a fetish. The younger son Guto, (Steffan Clenydd), likes to play guitar, eat shrooms and complain about how his family suckers.
Everyone is so focused upon their own little problems that Cadi’s strange behavior is completely ignored. Either they want her to do her job well or they see her as a potential sexual conquest. The supernatural warning signs are shining brightly, but they keep blinking. As Shelbyville said, “There are.” “doings a-transpiring.”We wait for the doings to occur. We wait and wait.
There’s a difference between “a slow burn”And “slow.”For suspense to develop, the temperature has to rise at minimum once in a while. Roger Williams’ screenplay is frustratingly content just to drop the set-up and then add little or no information until the film’s third act. Only the last half-hour does it really shine. “The Feast”It finally revealed that it does indeed have a plot and that its point is a little more specific than this. “these bad people are bad,”These heartless jerks will be put through the physical and psychological ringer.
Images are available in “The Feast”They are quite grisly, but the film is so laden with them that it feels less like a payoff than a missed chance. The first two courses of the three-course meal were bland. The third course is exciting, but by that point our appetite has waned, our interest in the company has dissipated, and we’re pretty much ready to go home.
This is all the fault of the cast. They do know what their job is. Elwy maintains the mystery surrounding Cadi, balancing between innocent wonderment and menacing machinations in a way that makes more sense as it goes. Davies is a creepy, scary horror show. Even their small house, which is a boxy shell, gives a fine performance.
There’s something to be said for the efficiency of “The Feast,”The clever way it uses mythological terror to create a sense of horror without ever actually telling the audience. Jones and Williams assume we already know the stories. Just like the characters. Even if we have no idea what they’re talking about, we can infer from their reactions the nasty bullet points, so we get the basic gist of just how these a-holes have angered the horror-movie gods and what’s to become of them.
But if you’re going to be vague, why only be vague at the end? Sprinkle the evil breadcrumbs everywhere “The Feast” might have kept the film’s second act from dragging, or at the very least made it feel like we were being dragged toward something important. It’s an unfortunate miscalculation in an otherwise, stylish, mean, gross horror thriller. This really brings down the party and dampens the thrills. Some events may be “Bring Your Own Beer,”But “The Feast”It is “Bring Your Own Fear.”
“The Feast”Friday release in U.S. theaters, and on-demand.