Mark Reviews Movies: THE FEAST

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 18, 2021

Something has been unleashed on the Welsh countryside at the start of The Feast. A drill whirs and burrows through the ground. The man working the equipment starts sprinting away from the site. He collapses face-forward into the ground, and we catch but a glimpse of the blood on his face. Still, the unmanned drill continues its work.

This man is unimportant. Indeed, most of the characters in Roger Williams' screenplay aren't too important, except for what they represent. They're wealthy. They don't care for the simple things and the traditional ways. They don't know how good they have it, and hence, they want more.

Williams and director Lee Haven Jones (making his narrative feature debut) don't particularly care for or about these characters, a well-to-do family with sins that run as shallow as greed and as deep as unspoken crimes against nature. To be fair, they don't have to care about them, considering that the movie amounts to a long wait, in which we see how mean and petty and self-involved each of the family members is, before some kind of terrible reckoning eventually catches up to all of them. It is a long wait, to be clear, and in the process of anticipating whatever inevitable fate the filmmakers have in store for these characters, there's very little with which to connect in this story.

The family members are introduced in brief vignettes one at a time. Glenda (Nia Roberts) is preparing for a dinner party with a business associate and a couple of neighbors. Her elder son Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies) dresses into a skin-tight unitard, admiring his form in the mirror and what he has between his legs in his hand.

His brother Guto (Steffan Cennydd) watches the scene with some disgust, before wandering around the property as one in his position—a guy with no apparent ambitions except to party and a lot of boredom being stuck on what used to be a farm—does. Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), the young men's father and Glenda's husband, is hunting rabbit for the dinner, and he is inordinately proud that he was able to shoot two rabbits on this occasion.

There's little more to these characters as the story crawls its way through a general air of discomfort. We learn, for example, that Glenda inherited the large expanse of land from her parents, that Gwyn is also the local Member of Parliament, that Gweirydd was studying to become a doctor before deciding to do a triathlon, and that Guto had—or is now hiding—a drug addiction. The land, as it turns out, might be the most important thing about any of them.

Into this household arrives Cadi (Annes Elwy), a mysterious and mostly silent young woman, who has come to prepare for and serve at the dinner party. She's a last-minute replacement, taking over from the usual woman who works such events for the family, and in case the family's various faults and superior attitude isn't apparent, Cadi is also here to be judged by Glenda, to be horrified by Gwyn's story of terrorizing a family of rabbits, and to be ogled by the sons.

A few mysteries run through the decorating and cooking, the party itself, and Cadi's excursions alone or with other characters in between her work. Most of them—such as what Cadi does with a piece of broken glass, why she seems to leave a trail of dirt behind her even though she's clean, and how some hallucinogenic mushrooms figure into whatever scheme she has going—are answered by the end of this story.

As for what Cadi is or was or represents or has become possessed by, though, all we have are rumors, legends, some news about an accident, and a local myth about a specific piece of land. This family owns part of it, and Euros (Rhodri Meilier), an associate whose business deals with drilling for minerals and precious metals, wants to make a deal with the family's neighbor Mair (Lisa Palfrey) to explore the rest of the area. That's the entire reason for the party.

That, such as it is, is the story, which isn't much, but Williams and Jones at least know it's mostly an excuse for a series of enigmas, which are presented with an atmosphere of some admirable uneasiness. They gradually escalate into a few uncomfortable scenes of imagined or, once it becomes clear that the stranger to the house has some inexplicable but deadly goal in mind, real terror.

We get a lot of cryptic foreshadowing (that piece of glass going somewhere, a foot wound that seems incapable of healing, and an image of a skewer being cleaned dissolving to meet an ear), as well as implications or full-on displays of grisly happenings later. Elwy's mostly silent performance provides a contradictory sense of dainty dread.

The Feast exists, then, primarily as a mood piece. No number of portents of doom or hints of some deeper significance, though, can compensate for how thin and predictable this material is and ultimately becomes.

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