Glenda (Nia Roberts) enlists the help of Cadi (Annes Elwy) in preparing a rich feast for her family and associates at their country estate.  She wants to make a good impression of a happy successful family despite their perceived shortcomings: her husband Gwyn’s (Julian Lewis Jones) questionable skill as a provider, their older son Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies) having traded in his medical career in pursuit of a triathlon, and their younger son Guto (Steffan Cennydd) who was brought back home from London after a drug overdose. 

The Feast is the feature length debut for both director Lee Haven Jones and screenwriter Roger Willaims.  Filmed in Welsh and released by IFC Midnight on Hulu, the ninety-three minute thriller wastes little time in setting the eerie, unsettling tone and by the end it devolves into a bloody and creatively gory disaster all carefully planned out on the page by Williams and beautifully shot by Bjørn Ståle Bratberg.  Split into five chapters, the titles of which we quickly realize are lines of dialogue contained within, these precursors of the dread to follow help to keep us engaged to an already enthralling and captivating piece as we await to learn the context of the chapter titles. 

One of the most unique things about The Feast is how Williams structured his script.  It is very sparse with dialogue, at least insofar as Cadi is concerned, because much of what we need to learn as an audience is delivered through conversations and comments made by others.  It is an interesting and puzzling nested structure, but one that never leaves us feeling lost with what is happening.  There is always a sense of a mystery unfolding, but with every new question asked, an answer is also revealed. 

What is most impressive is how he handles the lore of the film.  He does not place it under a microscope, yet we still have a full understanding of the gravity of the situation and what is going on, like how Mariano Llinás handles the lore in the opening chapter of La Flor (2018).  We are given all the tools and information needed to understand without ever getting into the granule details, and for both the mummy in La Flor and the spirits at work in The Feast, we do not need the excessive elaboration and that simplicity is one of the more efficient things about both of those works.  With a better knowledge of Welsh folk tales, there may be more below the surface here, but even for the unversed, there are essential themes that shine through. 

Jones, then, adds to the mystery by setting the camera in such a way that it always finds Cadi somewhere in the background when she is not the focus of the shot.  It is not shy to clue us in that there is something a little off about her; her strange mannerisms, her selective muteness, and her reaction to handling game meat despite coming from the kitchen in a local pub.  Elwy delivers an incredibly expressive and physical performance that evokes a strange sense of sympathy from us even if we never feel fully safe with her. 

The rest of the ensemble deliver strong performances as well.  They all operate well within their characters and give a personality to each.  Like with the rest of the script, many of the inner workings of their relationships are sussed out through passing lines of dialogue exchanged between them and not overt exposition.  There is so much information slipped into the script that in the moment it feels like it is just adding texture to the narrative, but by the end it all comes back into play and we can finally see what a depraved situation The Feast really is. 

It is a cautionary tale, and while it may not spell out the specifics of the spirit at work here as, for example, Ari Aster does in Hereditary (2018) with King Paimon, Williams does not leave us feeling lost or abandoned.  As the night wears on, and the final chapter title appears, and we, already drowning in a sense of dread from the horrors we witnessed, have one final terrifying revelation that the gruesomeness of The Feast is not just gore for the sake of gore.  No, it is a brutal and vicious reminder that we cannot eat money. The contextualization of the eco-horror core does not come from left field, but as with so much in this film helps to backfill in the reasoning of all of the strangeness that was served up prior.