The most redemptive quality of the new money family doomed to ruin in Lee Haven Jones’ “The Feast” is that they speak Welsh. If you’ve never seen Welsh in writing, buckle up for an orthography comprising a dizzying array of digraphs; if you’ve never heard it spoken, challenge yourself by learning how to pronounce the longest word in the tongue without fainting. Less than 30% of Welsh people speak Welsh, which makes Welsh speakers uncommon company. The high society fools in Jones’ film are much rarer company by comparison: Astronomically wealthy and doubly aloof, ensconced in a modern chic glass-walled palace sticking out like a sore thumb against verdant hills.
Wales is a far green land, and that greenery surrounds the home of Glenda (Nia Roberts), nervous wife of Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), a macho man who ostensibly serves elected office. Gwyn doesn’t carry himself like a politician, of course. He’s a tough guy and performative bureaucrat voted in by duped masses who equate leadership with brute strength. He and Glenda don’t spend most of their time in Wales as is, preferring to stay in London. The house nearly reads like an inconvenience to them, and especially to their idiot sons Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies) and Guto (Steffan Cennydd). But they have to keep up the appearance of Welshness, and so to their house, they go to host a dinner party with other esteemed guests.
Such is the effort of entertaining that Glenda hires help, Cadi (Annes Elwy), a quiet young woman who speaks volumes through observant eyes. Gwyn, Glenda, Gweirydd, and Guto never pick up on what she’s saying, of course. They’re too stuck on their own vain concerns, the first world woes of the ultra-rich, to notice. Cadi scarcely makes a blip on their radars, save for when she screws up or Glenda’s too overwhelmed by glassware and tablecloths to function. Jones finds a bitter comedy in the family’s helplessness contrasted with their deep pockets; this is close to the same point Bong Joon-ho made in “Parasite,” that the 1% leech off of everybody else by hoarding wealth and have the gall to expect their noses will be wiped for them.
That said, “The Feast” isn’t “Parasite,” but that would be an unfair comparison to begin with. Jones plays in the same sandbox as “Boys from County Hell,” “Rawhead Rex,” and “The Blood on Satan’s Claw,” where man snoops around in the past or digs too deep in the earth and pisses off an ancient, grudge-bearing supernatural entity. Cadi is neither who nor what she seems. She has a purpose at Gwyn’s home. What that is, Jone holds in reserve. He spends his film’s earlier stages settling into his tone and looking for space to reveal this family as an ink stain on the Welsh countryside. The film opens on Glenda peeling away her charcoal face mask in her dungeonesque home spa, while Gweirydd forces his scrawny form into a black spandex singlet; later, Gwyn spins a horseshit yarn of hunting prowess, claiming he sniped two rascally rabbits when he actually found them strung up neat as you please at the edge of a clearing. No matter. They’re what he’s brought for dinner.
Gwyn postures, Glenda frets, Guto sweats, and Gweirydd does his best Patrick Bateman impression; meanwhile, Cadi watches, and Jones watches with her. He alternates “The Feast” between precise static shots for interior scenes and considerably more relaxed photography for exterior scenes; crawly-creeps trickle into the film over its 90-minute running time slowly, then quicker, then quickest once Cadi drops the demure pretense and snowballs her plan to gruesome effect. It’s a bleak pleasure, noting how the movie gains vitality as the characters lose theirs; Jones may not sit in judgment of this family, but he doesn’t appear to like them much, though he extends them empathy regardless. Glenda, Gweirydd, and Guto exist in Gwyn’s galaxy the way orbital debris floats about our own. In reverse order, most to least, they all dislike him. Gwyn is filmed at distance to emphasize Jones’ stature, the way he towers over everyone – everyone – in the film. He’s a big man. He knows it. He acts like it.
This may be “The Feast’s” best detail: That one so large should be opposed by one so small. Elwy’s dimension is presented as a predatory advantage. She is unassuming and no threat at all, which makes her the biggest threat there is. “The Feast” takes umbrage with man’s presumptuous dominion over nature, this one world we’ve been given to live on; as Gwyn and Glenda dismiss old tales and shrug off Welsh tradition, so too do they ignore the costs of taking too much from that world. Jones marries eco-horror with folk horror, and through the pairing tells a modern story of Wales today in conversation with the Wales of yesterday. The two niches go hand in hand in a country like this, where the land and the legends are inseparable, which means any trespass against one is a trespass against the other. No wonder Cadi has come to this house, on this night, given how close the Welsh relate to Wales itself.
Well: There’s some wonderful, but that’s best left to Jones’ devices. “The Feast” does what so many attempts at elevating horror fail to: Make the buildup to the inevitably bonkers payoff worth the wait. It helps to have a cast capable of making repugnant characters magnetic; Gweirydd might be a whole lot of way too weird, but Davies gives him such a self-assured entitlement that for brief stretches of time, the weirdness almost reads as endearing. But it also helps to pepper nauseating gore throughout the story rather than jam it all into the finale, and “The Feast” certainly has more than a couple of choice gore shots; it also helps that Jones understands that aesthetics should match up with the setting and that he crafts the film around stillness and abandon. There’s much to like about his work here. Just skip the canapes. [A-]
“The Feast” is available now in select theaters and VOD.