Dinner parties can be their own kind of torture, and in cinematic form they are ripe places to defuse social discomfort. When directors lock people up in a room together and aggressively impose social niceties, they only arouse writhing resentments and discontent. Black comedies like Sally Potter’s The party, Thrillers like Karyn Kusama’s The invitationor dysfunctional family dramas like John Wells’ August: Osage County – they all determine the moment during a meeting when politeness gives way to honesty and small talk turns into real talk. Then all hell breaks loose. The Welsh horror film The party is a quiet little marvel of a film that thrives on this kind of discomfort and leads to exactly this chaos.
Elegant and gruesome at the same time, The party is the latest in this year’s mini trend towards environmentally oriented horror scenarios Down in the soil and Gaia. Director Lee Haven Jones and writer Roger Williams create an atmosphere of ubiquitous silence (thick forests, expansive moors) and then contrast it with the environmentally harmful presence of people. Cinematographer Bjørn Ståle Bratberg captures the malevolence of artificial machines in close-up shots: the pumping grinding of an oil rig that sucks in viscous liquid from the underground, the metallic glint of a double-barreled shotgun in the grass, the thud of an ax head as it falls to the ground. Regardless, these items are theoretically signs of civilized progress. Together they take on a more sinister tone and ask, “How much of our creativity is inspired by dominating the world around us, and at what cost?”
The party takes place in a single day in a remote mansion in the Welsh mountains, only accessible by dirt road. It is far from its neighbors and is populated by an upper-class family whose members can hardly stand each other. Glenda (Nia Roberts), wife of local politician Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), is a passive-aggressive cascade of complaints and humility: the local grocery store doesn’t have a bok choy, so they had a courier deliver it fresh to their home. The pub owner she originally hired to help prepare and serve during a last minute canceled dinner party, which Glenda’s aspirations are not. “I want to make a good impression,” she says. When a young woman, Cadi (Annes Elwy), arrives at the end of their ride, Glenda immediately assumes she is the pub owner’s successor and starts bossing her around.
The explicit classicism of this dynamic draws irritation from Glenda’s son Guto (Steffan Cennydd), who is curious about the quiet Cadi, and amusement from her other son Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies), whose hungry look at Cadi makes serious American psycho Vibrations. Cadi is just as curious about her as she is, and Jones gradually increases the audience’s fear as Cadi wanders through this strange house. In the narrow sauna cabin, the slit doors reveal an interior that looks like a prison. In Gweirydd’s bedroom, the floor-to-ceiling windows are open so he can look out – or someone else can look in. The party embarks on a path of voyeurism and then undermines expectations of who’s going to break in and who’s going to break through Williams’s clever, revealing script and a few well-edited, terrifyingly violent sequences.
The party takes patience, and some of its stylistic flourishes don’t exactly work. The film is broken down into roughly half a dozen chapters, with title cards revealing the lines to come. Their involvement adds nothing to the already sparse, powerful dialogue. The folklore element could use a little more contextualization, and flirting with a haunted house setup would have been fascinating to explore. But there is also a power in how committed The party
How would we look if we really were from Earth, and what horrors are associated with returning to our origins? Jones offers a series of images that echo the movie’s presumption that humanity is some kind of invasion: a smudge of smudge on a piece of brightly colored modern art; Drops of blood falling into translucent bath water; a drop of vomit that falls into a well-prepared meal for a dinner party. By examining how best to behave while naturally embodying the worst effects of capitalism and greed, and knowing when to give up humility in favor of brutality, Jones and Williams turn to it The party into one of the most cleverly conceived, apparently most effective horror scenarios of the year.
The party Debuts in the limited theatrical version and on digital rental platforms such as DirectTV and Vudu on November 19th.