Mark Reviews Movies: THE DINNER PARTY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 4, 2020

Showing cruelty on screen is always a risk for filmmakers. It's necessary at times, to make clear the horrific nature of certain characters or situations. Take the portrayal too far without offering any kind of insight, though, and it's just going to come across as excessive and/or exploitative. With The Dinner Party, screenwriters Miles Doleac (who also directed) and Michael Donovan Horn ensure their movie falls into that second category.

The whole movie is too much—and not just in terms of violence, blood, gore, unnatural behavior, and the like. It drags out everything, even before the story gets to a beheading, some necrophilia, and a lot of cannibalism. All of the nasty stuff feels as if Doleac and Horn are overcompensating for how obvious, familiar, and dull the lengthy setup to the ensuing horror show actually is.

Haley (Alli Hart) and her playwright husband Jeff (Mike Mayhall) have been invited to secretive dinner party held by some wealthy folks. Jeff hopes they'll produce his latest play, but he's too busy scolding his wife, treating her like a child, and being blinded by the potential financial gain to notice that the couple's hosts are a weird bunch. After a lot of hollow discussion about opera and Haley's revelations about abuse she suffered as a child, Jeff's existence is cut short with a meat clever, leaving Haley to endure a long night of aberrations.

To be fair, the movie does come close to making some kind of point about how the effects of abuse and trauma linger. Haley, who eventually fights back against her captors (As questionable as everything else is, Doleac does imbue the vengeful action here with energy), is one example.

So, too, are Carmine (Bill Sage), the mansion's owner whose parents forced him to eat a human liver as a child, and Agatha (Kamille McCuin), a successful novelist whose mortician father forced her to have sex with a corpse as a kid. The other hosts, witch Sadie (Lindsay Anne Williams) and opera enthusiast Sebastian (Sawandi Wilson), just torment Haley when it's their turn. They all get a turn, meaning the second act is as stretched thin as the first.

In the end, though, these characters' histories just feel like empty justification for The Dinner Party to show one disgusting thing after another. That's the only reason for the movie's existence.

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