The Feast (Gwyledd) (2021)

directed by Lee Haven Jones

UK

93 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm always excited about new Welsh-language films, even more so when they're genre films. For that reason I have had The Feast on my watchlist for a long time without actually knowing much about it, and I think that's the best way to go into it. Because I ended up being so fond of it, though, I really want to talk about things that would spoil the plot, so I'd recommend not reading any further if you haven't watched the film yet. Suffice to say it's an extremely slow burner that isn't afraid to take all the time it needs to establish itself, and the way it goes about being a horror movie is admirable at a time when a lot of movies seem to be obsessed with constantly checking behind themselves to make sure the viewer is still following them.

I noticed right away that Annes Elwy's character, Cadi, was wet when we first saw her. I didn't know why, I just kind of filed it away as something that might be significant later. I equated it with the overall aesthetic of cleanliness that the first quarter of the film has - her having washed her hair right before she came to the house could have been another signifier of the need to maintain a perfect appearance that many of the characters have. But, while her hair being wet did turn out to be an enormously significant clue to who she was, I was wrong about the cleanliness aspect. I wanted to bring this tiny detail up anyway because it's just a taste of how meticulous The Feast is in building itself up using things that are so small you barely realize they're important.

Because I didn't know anything about the underlying story, for a while Elwy's character felt very alienating. There is a slow transition, at least for anyone unaware of the trajectory the film is headed on, from just watching someone do strange things to becoming aware that something bigger is going on, and during that transition the film requires some trust. I have seen movies where the end message is just that somebody is a freak; unkind films about an interloper whose behavior is visibly "abnormal" and who is cast as inherently untrustworthy for it up until a reveal where they turn out to inevitably be some murderer or something, because murderers are always maladjusted creeps according to the popular narrative, so that's where I thought this was going. Don't be like me; stick with this. Have faith that it's not trying to demonize anybody - nothing so simple as that. Elwy does a brilliant job portraying an almost entirely unreadable character, right up until and beyond when her true nature is revealed. I hesitate to even use the word "revealed", though, because it was being shown to us all along - from the second she shows up and is inexplicably wet.

The cinematography is nigh on flawless and perfectly suited to the kind of film this is and the kind of message it gets across. We spend a lot of time inside this house that could be a model home, with nothing out of place, perfectly color-coordinated and magazine-ready until Cadi comes and mismatches the glasses and leaves just a tiny bit of dirt here and there, just to remind the family where they are. Even though the set decoration looks Insta-worthy, I think that kind of fakeness and impossibly clean aestheticism was deliberately meant to look unsustainable rather than be a backdrop for the film that was incidental. It doesn't feel intended to compliment the look of the film so much as it serves as a point being made: Look at what these rich people do, look at how foreign to nature it is.

The other characters may not be as much of a central force to the narrative as Cadi is, but they make up important parts that complete it. Their individual roles are really interesting and I still don't know if I fully understand them. They each seem to end up with a fate that reflects something of the role they played in the environmental destruction that brought Cadi (or the thing wearing Cadi)'s wrath upon them, and the most striking of them all, I think, was the mother and wife's final scene. All throughout the film you get the sense that she's very preoccupied with keeping up appearances, very intent on being a certain kind of person and coming off a certain way, but - and I know tons of women like this in real life, it is something that society can force on a person - you also get the sense that some core part of her disagrees with it all. But she pushes it down, even though all the while she's aware of what she's responsible for and it tears her up inside. She builds a quiet spa room and goes in and does face masks. She nervously evangelizes the benefits of letting people onto your land to rip out the profitable parts and leave a lifeless slurry behind. And finally she admits what she's done, takes revenge on the hand that coerced her, and removes herself from the equation too, the only repentance she can see.

The Feast manages to tell a mythic story that does not feel at all out of place with the so-called "modern" world. There's a sense of, like, "nobody still believes that, how can you believe that?" Characters chide each other for having so much faith in old legends but everyone knows, whether they profess to believe or not, that it's true. A ruthless certainty pervades The Feast, as inevitable as the course of nature. Able to be delayed for a while, but it always comes back in the end. I'm a bit surprised to see so many people calling this "heavy-handed" because of its ecological-horror message - yes, it eventually becomes unambiguous, but it's such a slow burn that it almost feels like the film is trying to be as gradual with its message as it can. I would hope that there are not so many people who see any hint at an environmentalist agenda as heavy-handed; it is justified as there's a generation or two who grew up with after-school specials drilling vague and ultimately unhelpful personal responsibility for pollution into us, but films like The Feast aren't part of that trite preaching.