By Nicole Veneto

The Feast isn’t coherent enough to go toe to toe with modern folk horror heavyweights, but it’s an admirable entry in the canon.

 The Feast, directed by Lee Haven Jones. Now available on VoD.

Annes Elwy as Cadi in The Feast. Photo: BFI

Folk horror has been having something of a moment over the past few years. From A24 hits like Midsommar and The Witch to lesser known foreign gems like November and Hagazussa, contemporary folk horror scratches an itch for more visceral, grounded, and grotesque imagery, the kind of earthy shocks that cheap jump-scares and CGI-heavy monsters can’t deliver to bloodthirsty audiences. The past year has given us a definitive documentary about the genre, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, but otherwise 2021 hasn’t produced anything on the level of either Ari Aster’s or Robert Eggers’s modern-day folk horror masterpieces. The Feast, directed by Lee Haven Jones and written by Roger Williams, is a worthwhile attempt at merging the stylistic and thematic trappings of the folk horror lexicon with a class-based ecocritique indicting the rich for exploitative crimes against nature.

Parliamentarian Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones, sporting one of the worst haircuts I’ve seen in recent movie memory) and his pristine wife Glenda (Nia Roberts) are hosting a small dinner party for their neighbors at their newly built mansion in the Welsh moors. Once owned as farmland by Glenda’s parents, the sprawling estate is now a hot spot for valuable mineral drilling. With her sights set on acquiring her neighbors’ property, Glenda desperately wants “to make a good impression” with a fancy three-course meal to sweeten a land acquisition offer. Hours before the guests arrive, a pale, slight young woman named Cadi (Annes Elwy) arrives in their driveway to fill in for the family’s hired help at the last minute. She’s barely in the door before Glenda’s admonishing her about punctuality and underlining unreasonably high service expectations, which Cadi passively absorbs without a single word. (One gets the impression that she’s used to being talked at and not actually to.) Between preparing the gourmet courses and meticulously setting out the silverware, Cadi wanders silently about the mansion like a ghost haunting ancient hallowed grounds, observing Gwyn and Glenda’s sons Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies), a health-obsessed triathlon athlete giving off some serious Patrick Bateman vibes, and Guto, a drug-addicted rocker on parental-imposed house arrest away from the London scene.

A strongly ominous atmosphere leads up to the dinner that neither Glenda nor Gwyn — comfortably insulated from the real world by their outlandishly posh existence — seem privy to. An axe falls blade first onto Guto’s foot. Streaks of dirt mysteriously stain a white tablecloth. Gweirydd draws blood while shaving himself hairless in the bathtub. First guest and drilling project manager Euros (Rhodri Meilir) drops a bottle of Cabernet and leaves the shards for Cadi to clean up. And with Cadi’s arrival, the innate tensions between Glenda, Gwyn, Gweirydd, and Guto slowly percolate to the surface in stark view of each other and their guests. This simmering animosity between father, mother, and sons is freely unloaded upon Cadi as if she’s a phone-in therapist. When she’s not being spoken at or commandeered around, Cadi quietly watches (like she’s in on a secret the others don’t know) from the sidelines as the family and the dinner party implode on themselves. Eventually, these tensions culminate in a gory final act that’s equal parts disquieting, disgusting, and feverish in its unraveling.

The first word that comes to mind when describing The Feast is “slow burn,” an aspect of modern horror cinema that’s become rather overplayed in my opinion. Aside from a graphic rabbit-skinning scene and a quick-cut montage of events to come, Jones saves all of the film’s skin-crawling scares for the last 20 minutes. I’ve always been someone who prefers grandiose displays of blood and guts earlier rather than later in a movie’s runtime (think the elaborate murder set-piece that opens Dario Argento’s Suspiria or even the human origami scene nearly 40 minutes into Luca Guadagnino’s two-and-a-half hour version). Intensifying an audience’s sense of dread through sheer atmosphere alone is fine filmmaking, but the lack of upfront scares in The Feast means that the final act has to shoulder a lot of the creepy lore and savage visuals that would be more effective if they were interspersed throughout the runtime.

Accordingly, the folklore element in the film is lost in its scramble toward a bloody conclusion. All that invasive drilling throughout the estate has revealed an intricate maze of unexplored caves running underground and into neighbor Mair’s (Lisa Palfrey) property, hence Glenda’s eagerness to acquire Mair’s struggling farmland for personal profit. Has drilling unearthed something more malicious than fossil fuels? Mair mentions a local legend about the land bordering her farm (the Rise), cautioning Glenda against disturbing the terrain because “[t]hat’s where she’s resting” and that “[s]he shouldn’t be awakened.” Glenda dismisses Mair’s warnings as superstitious nonsense meant to keep children from wandering too far from home, at which Mair brusquely storms out in anger, leaving the “who” (or “what”) being spoken of frustratingly vague. Mother Nature? Glenda’s deceased mother? Cadi?

What deserves the most praise in this film is Bjørn Ståle Bratberg’s gorgeous cinematography. Bratberg captures the undulating green moors and the eerily narrow hallways of the mansion with sumptuous slow-zooms and wide-angle lenses that recall the look of Dogtooth and Raw if filtered through the Welsh countryside. Broadly speaking, the biggest pet peeve I have with contemporary horror (and movies in general) is the need to color-grade everything into either flat shades of wet cement or unnatural yet desaturated greenish hues. With many scenes taking place during the daytime, Bratberg photographs the beautiful Welsh moors in all their naturally green glory. Blades of grass emit a soft glow under the sun that turns into a misty fog rolling through the woods at night.

Although The Feast raises more questions than it cares to answer, the critique it wages against the wealthy’s signature brand of narcissism (and how that subsequently bleeds into a callous disregard for both the environment and the less economically privileged people who inhabit it) is pretty sharp for a debut filmmaker. Plus, if you’re into women doing sick shit as much as I am, there’s one scene that’ll sear itself into your memory and leave you recoiling from the mere thought of it. Overall, The Feast isn’t coherent enough to go toe to toe with modern folk horror heavyweights, but it’s an admirable entry in the canon.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. You can follow her on Letterboxd and Twitter @kuntsuragi for weird and niche movie recommendations.