In 2007, in the Dutch city of Groningen, three men were charged and found guilty of hosting sex parties wherein they would drug the gay men they lured to their home, inject them with syringes of HIV-positive blood, and leave their unconscious bodies strewn about the city.  Tim Leyendekker directs Feast, released by Mubi in the United States after its premiere at the 2021 screening of Rotterdam, a pseudo-documentary that is composed of a handful of vignettes that seek to understand the motivations of the accused and the fallout felt by the victims. 

At a short-on-paper seventy-five minutes, Feast has a large story to tell in its run and does so quite well even with its strange approach to pacing and delivery.  It opens with a static shot of a woman from the police force going through the three crates of evidence retrieved from the apartment.  It is an unflinching look that sets the stage for the film but also sets the stage in the audience’s mind just what happened at these parties as the handler treats every bit of evidence – from the snacks to music and movies, to the various sex toys pulled from the house – with the same surgical seriousness.  Leyendekker lets us know early on that this film will explore some uncomfortable topics at times, but despite that discomfort, he will handle it all with the same care as displayed on screen in this opening sequence. 

What follows is more setting the tone for the philosophy of the film.  It is a rumination on what is sex, what is love, what is consent, and further what are the boundaries of consent?  The most narrative of the sequences, this section leaves us cold.  We can start to put faces to the criminals here, but the film is constantly trying to justify their actions.  While a good documentary does its best to present the facts in an unbiased way, it is rather distasteful that Leyendekker will allow these men, even though a dramatic setup, a platform to justify their deliberate luring and infecting of gay men with HIV. 

The next two sequences are monologues from two of the people involved.  One is of the accused, whose face and features are shrouded in intense visual noise, the second, is one of the victims.  While it is not fully understood why the identity of the accused in the very public case is kept shrouded, the monologue he delivers is just as confounding as it frames him as a victim.  In the same way, the victim is framed as if he is one of the guilty hosts and is further coached by, who we can only assume is, Leyendekker interviewing him as if for a talking-head documentary.  The purposeful confusion for the audience is supposed to mirror the confusion of the people at the time, many of whom blamed the victims for engaging in the parties even though when they got there they were drugged and unable to consent, but it just feels so wrong in the approach on behalf of the filmmakers. 

In the penultimate piece, we are taken to a laboratory where a botanist explains how a virus works in plants.  It has its own needs to fill in order to survive and will move along to find a host strong enough to support its needs.  In a vacuum, it is a very interesting segment, but in the context of Feast it seems to again be victim-blaming by trying to explain that the HIV they were injected with was somehow just another part of life.  The framing of almost all of these vignettes comes back to the very dangerous and outdated stereotype that HIV is a gay disease and that if the victims had just made better (read: more heterosexual) choices, they would be spared this fate.  

Finally, we are at what appears to be a deposition with another of the victims.  As in the second piece, Leyendekker’s script is incredibly heavy-handed, and like the rest of the film, it is often presenting arguments against the victims.  If this approach is meant to show the hypocrisy and downright idiocy of victim-blaming it fails on almost every attempt as when we are talking to the victims, they are either coached, or in this case, talked down to and coerced into how they should feel and think about what happened to them. 

Feast is a true mess of a film that seems at first just a misfire in its construction but taking a look at it at a macro level, it turns out it is a big step backward from where we should be and how we should be engaging with these topics in 2022.  It does not seem purposefully malicious in its intent, but rather just a continued chain of poor choices and it is impressive that its outdated and dangerous lean was not caught somewhere along the line.  In a strange twist of fate, its aggressive film school style works in its favor as most of its message is hidden under layers of pretentious visual nonsense.