Glenda (Nia Roberts) is accustomed to getting what she wants, even if that means the bok choy has to be delivered to the door of her out of the way, absurdly sleek home, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and sarcophagus-like sauna.
Glenda’s husband Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones) is a corrupt politician who has paid for modern art that adorns the walls of their home by selling fracking rights.
The couple’s adult sons are as maladjusted as their parents are privileged. Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies), the unsettling one in the unitard, is not even the black sheep of the family; that dubious honour falls to the twitchy, recovering heroin addict, Guto (Steffan Cennydd).
The Feast, an ambitious Welsh-language horror written and produced by Roger Williams, takes place in a single, gruesome day, in which a dinner party hosted by Glenda goes horrifically wrong, and not just because of the hair and spit in the food.
Glenda is hoping “to make a good impression”, a phrase that seems to translate into assisting her husband in swindling the neighbours.
The Feast is at its best during the elegantly atmospheric, nervy first hour
When the pub owner Glenda hired to assist with catering cancels, the hostess presumes that Cadi (Annes Elwy), a strange, silent young woman who appears in their driveway, has been sent as a last-minute replacement. Even before we see Cadi put pieces of a broken glass into her vagina, it’s clear that she is even stranger than the grotesques who have hired her. Her tangled hair turns up in the starter and she vomits into the rabbits that are served as a main course. When Gwyn gropes her, the nursery tune she hums produces paralysing tinnitus and migraine.
Pitched somewhere between folk horror, ecological revenge and scathing class critique, The Feast is at its best during the elegantly atmospheric, nervy first hour, as cinematographer Bjørn Ståle Bratberg picks out ominous details. The baroque denouement splatters, both literally and narratively, as terrible secrets surface, maggots writhe in wounds, and — for good measure — a goddess rises. Magic mushrooms and a hellish migraine add to madness of this impressive first feature from Doctor Who regular Lee Haven Jones.
