‘A Banquet’ Review: Ruth Paxton’s Feature Debut Needs A Little Less Seasoning

What’s going on with Betsey? That’s the crux of Ruth Paxton‘s feature debut, the intense family psychodrama “A Banquet,” for which she, and writer Justin Bull, provide many alluring choices but no definitive answer. Instead, the film—about a family that experiences a major trauma and tragedy and the teenage daughter who is forever, radically altered and “enlightened” afterward—flirts with several compelling subtexts, dresses them up in genre psycho-horror garb, and then rushes to a climax that provides no conclusive key to its central riddle. The film’s lack of resolve about its themes spells its downfall. With a little more focus, “A Banquet” could be a haunting portrait of a family in crisis, an adolescent adrift, and mothers’ care gone sour. As presented, however, it’s an elaborate yet clumsy slice of domestic horror that bites off more than it can chew.

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Besides, haven’t nuclear families in crisis been done to death by horror films recently? The apparent touchstones Paxton and Bull filch from here are admirable ones, like “Take Shelter,” “Melancholia,” and Ari Aster‘s first two movies. All dwell in similar homes made horrifying, on scales both close-quartered and cosmic. While these references are tasteful enough throughout, they render the family strife in “A Banquet” more than a little redundant, especially when what happens to them isn’t as decisive as a rogue planet crashing into Earth. In any case, this is another family in trouble, and Paxton commits to their misery. Paxton at least clarifies that from the opening scene, when Jason (Richard Keep), Betsey’s father, commits suicide by bleach to escape terminal illness, an act both Betsey (Jessica Alexander) and her mother, Holly (Sienna Guillory), witness. How these two women respond to tragedy sets up the rest of the film and their household’s dissolution.  

In Holly’s case, she soldiers on as a single mother who cooks resplendent, ultra-healthy meals for her two daughters, as much about nourishment as about keeping up appearances. Holly’s coping strategy is to maintain some pretense of normalcy as family savings dwindle. Isabelle (Ruby Stokes), Betsey’s younger sister, still thrives in the bright yet strangely laid-out household. However, Betsey becomes rudderless after Jason’s death, even as graduation and what she’ll do afterward loom on the horizon. A lost sense of direction isn’t uncommon after a death in the family, but Betsey’s inertia via grief comes across less as a coping skill than a totalizing trait. Paxton frames Betsey apart from friends and family, clasping her father’s ring that hangs from a chain around her neck. Death marks Betsey and distances her from kith and kin, as well as a vibrant sense of self.

And then, one night, while Betsey’s at a party, something happens. Paxton never explains the off-screen event, but it’s traumatic or enlightening, or both. Betsey wanders across the lawn under a blood-red moon and deep into the woods. When she re-emerges, she collapses, and other symptoms arise in the coming days. Her skin tingles and goes numb. She stares off vacantly at the dinner table and elsewhere. She also refuses to eat anything her mother puts in front of her. So, why won’t Betsey eat, and what’s eating her up inside? Paxton skirts around easy answers. The easiest of them all is an illness, except doctors can’t explain what’s going on. So, amid MRIs and psychiatric care referrals, Holly doubles down on discipline. The mother upgrades her motherly concern to full-on martinet as she scrapes food off Betsey’s plate into strict portions and diligently weighs her twice a day in an attempt to control and rationalize her daughter’s behavior.

Yet despite her loss of appetite, Betsey doesn’t starve or lose weight. Instead, she gets more erratic, raving about stars, destiny, and an apocalyptic reset fast approaching. As attempts to resolve the situation fail, anxiety sets in, then helplessness. Holly’s estranged mother June visits and brings with her disturbing implications. Maybe Betsey is making all this up, a well-rehearsed performance to stave off adult responsibility. Or perhaps this “illness” is inherited, something June repressed in Holly as a teen before it became apparent. Worse still is how June frames Betsey’s plight within a Japanese folktale where a young bride never eats but instead feeds an insatiable mouth hidden in the back of her head. June makes her insinuation clear: some unconscious force in Betsy poisons the family unit. The family fractures after June and Isabelle abandon mother and daughter in their terrified mutual acceptance of each other. Is their connection a united vision of a future cataclysm no one else can see? Or is it complicity in a shared fiction that collapses Holly and Betsey into a folie à deux?

Paxton and Bull set the table well in “A Banquet,” but they falter once they pile too much significance onto their plate. The connotations here are plenty–adolescent angst, arrested development, and, intriguingly, a lack of faith in modern upbringing practices–all intensified by the tropes of body horror, demonic possession, and imminent apocalypse. In addition, Betsey’s hunger strike implies a bevy of underlying issues: eating disorders, mental illness, religious conversion, multi-generational trauma. Put it all together, and there’s a lot of food for thought here. Most potent are the associations Paxton visually constellates between mouths and food. In the case of Betsey, restriction of appetite may not breed intelligence but instead derangement and deprivation from what she needs most: engagement with the broader world beyond the confines of what she already knows.

Is this too many flavors at once? Absolutely. The over-emphasis on all sorts of adolescently angled fears proves too much for a film this intimate. Teenage years are a liminal zone fraught with unease due to the numerous unforeseen changes in mind, body, and self-concept on the way to adulthood. It isn’t easy for anyone, but as Holly grapples with her daughter’s issues, one can’t help but think it’s overwrought of Paxton to conflate growing pains with the end of the world. Every lead actress brings their A-game here, but “A Banquet” lets their performances down with a concept that’s too half-baked to succeed. Culinary puns aside, Paxton has visual panache to spare. A slight tightening of technique and her next film may get a seat at the head of the table. [C+]