A Banquet

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source: A Banquet

A loving daughter suffers a weird personality change during a late night party, but her mother has her own way of dealing with it. Well produced drama, but it never gets into gear, and I definitely don't class it as horror. There is body distress, albeit with very little gore, yet we never go through the looking-glass to find out what the daughter is experiencing: she does talk plenty about fate and some higher power, but without elevating this beyond a bout of religious mania. The plot engine is female family relations, with a touch of the secretive coven, and the performances are all good. There is some pattern of abuse descending down the generations, and the ingestion (and its reverse) of dangerous substances is present at every point: from bleach, to alcohol (liquid and ... powdered?), tobacco and some vaped drug, and prescription pills. But then there's lots of food lovingly photographed, and it's the non-ingestion of that which proves the most harmful. The cinematography is good, with just a few bits of CGI. Editing kept a slow pace, but there was never much action outside the house. Music and sound design were good too. This seemed more a case study in a dysfunctional family, lacking the spark of horror that you get in something like Eat (2014), a movie that used the genre to give insight through action. I suppose you could compare this to The Exorcist, where a troubled daughter also sets things off, but again its the action that makes the difference. Horror does have a purpose, and being coy about its methods, or dismissive of them, leaves a story flat on its back.

It PAINS me to rate this an average score, but damn that ending. Absolutely no spoilers, but to ME, personally the climax, or more accurately, the last few moments, were such an incredible letdown. YOU or anyone may love it, and more power to you. So, I'm not really trying to discourage anyone from making it to the end. Hopefully, you'll get more out of it than me. UP to that point...I really dug this movie. The atmosphere, tension building, acting, cinematography...ALL so top notch, you'd think you were watching a $50 million-dollar Hollywood film. In fact, I was so amazed during this movie, I was wondering why most Hollywood movies I see aren't half as good as this talent. The film revolves around a family tragedy that leaves a single mom to raise her two daughters, the older of which is somehow transformed one night in the woods near a party she was attending and now...she won't eat. Okay, there's more to this, as expected, but her lack of eating, mood-swings and possible premonitions will increase alongside her mother's desperation to help her. This is labelled as "horror," but I'd put it more as a slow-burn suspense/family drama. And I've seen movies like this before and no offense to this cast/crew, but much better. Such as the real horror movie, Raw. There was also a segment of the horror anthology, XX, called "The Box" - also, much better. Still, it was fantastic to the end and I'll leave it up to you if you decide they did the story justice with their conclusion. *** Final Thoughts: Completely different movie, but I would also compare this slightly to 2021's Malignant. And that's only a small part of A Banquet. Please know, I loved Malignant 3x more overall. Still, I felt the need to bring it up.

It started off slow but picked up pace and raced to an eerie finish. "A Banquet" may not come close to touching the horror-genre films we've come to enjoy over the years. But what it lacked in overt demonic forces it made up for in subtle supernatural thrill. Directed by Ruth Paxton, the movie carried weight more as a psychological thriller than anything explicitly paranormal. It focused on the life and travails of a young woman named Betsey (played by Jessica Alexander) who experienced spooky circumstances, which compelled her mother Holly (played by Sienna Guillory) to do whatever she knew she had to do to save her daughter. After an unknown encounter in the woods during a blood moon night, Betsey seemed to have lost all desire for food. Her appetite was not just completely out of whack, she ended up despising food of any kind, for no verifiable reason. To Holly's horror, Betsey nearly choked on a single greenpea. Even Betsey's sister Isabelle (played by Ruby Stokes) could not wrap her mind around what was happening. An admission to a 24-7 care clinic soon followed where Betsey's bizarre symptoms gradually become indecipherable, not to forget that creepy disembodied whisper. She came back, seemingly all hale and healthy, but her strange problem persisted. It later appeared as if she was drawing the 'nutrients' she needed directly from sunlight, akin to photosynthesis. One thing led to another, and grandmother June (played by Lindsay Duncan) paid them a visit to see if she could help out in any way. June came carrying answers to Betsey's mystery illness - the girl neither fell sick nor grew thin after not eating a single bite for weeks. Betsey soon found herself voluntarily taking her mother to where it all started, at a treeline that looked as ordinary as any other, except this one was the source of the whispering voice that Betsey started hearing a while before she'd lost her appetite altogether. Both Sienna, Jessica, Ruby, and Lindsay gave stirring performances as Holly, Betsey, Isabelle, and June, respectively. Good musical scoring by CJ Mirra. David Liddell's cinematography was neat, and gave nothing away. The same can be said of Matyas Fekete's editing. Good work all round by other cast and crew members too. "A Banquet" on Amazon Prime VOD held suspense, subtlety, and a distinct thread of psychological horror. The film held its cards close to the chest until the last possible minute. The very preparation of vegetarian meals held a menacing angle, a threat whose source evaded me. The movie captivated all the way to a (cliffhanger) end, and contained existential elements.

This film start with a woman feeding a man, and the woman hugging the man scene! As turnout, this film is about a daughter "Betsey" need to survive from the possession of the demon! Entire film full of boring conversation, and annoying overuse scene! Such as, overuse of the walking scene, overuse of the searching scene, overuse of the yelling scene, overuse of the calling names scene, overuse of the staring scene, overuse of the drinking scene, overuse of the smoking scene, overuse of the preparing food scene, overuse of the sleeping scene, overuse of the talking on the phone scene, overuse of the hugging scene, and overuse of the vomiting scene! Make the film unwatchable! At the end, Betsey, and her mother "Holly" both died! That's it! Wasting time to watch!

After witnessing the death of her father, a young woman has a mysterious experience which leads her to believe that she is intended for a higher purpose. Deliberately paced and slow burning, Ruth Paxton and Justin Bull's film manages to portray the existential horror without (too much) reliance on gross out or trope-ish apocalyptic imagery. The slow burn unravelling of proceedings is sustained by smartly controlled filmmaking and excellent performances, particularly the double leads of Sienna Guillory and the extraordinary Jessica Alexander. It's final scene feels a tad familiar but doesn't lessen the strength of what's gone before. Well worth a look for admirers of films like Violation, Censor and Saint Maud or Von Triers mid period films, particularly Dogville and Melancholia.

Widowed mother Holly (Sienna Guillory, Jill Valentine from the Resident Evil movies) finds herself facing a crisis of faith over, well, faith when her teen daughter Betsey (Jessica Alexander, Glasshouse) undergoes a divine moment and claims that her body only exists to serve a higher power. Could this be real? Or is the family still dealing with the suicide of Holly's husband and the father to her children? And since Betsey found her father's body, is she feeling the loss most of all as she cuts herself off from popularity and friends and even life? And then one night, Holly finds herself lured into the woods, enchanted and now can't stand to be around food, refusing to eat and never losing weight, making doctors question their medical training. In fact, she soon grows to actually fear even being in the same room as any nourishment, which is a problem, as Holly deals with the pain by making huge feasts that her sister Isabelle (Ruby Stokes) happily devours. And Holly's mother June, played by Lindsay Duncan, is incredible and brings another type of pain to the story. So what is behind all this? Mental illness? Possession? Depression? All of it? None of it? I'm tempted to use the cliche that the filmmakers want to have their cake and eat it too, but the truth is that this movie never really settles on any one reason. That said, it's a stark meditation on loss and how that takes us to some incredbly bad places. Director Ruth Paxton (making her first full length film) and writer Justin Bull (who wrote and directed Merge) ask what obsessions after loss are healthy - is getting really into figure skating as bad as having a glimpse at the apocalypse and losing your mind? - and which aren't. The home that this all takes place in feels like the dark homes of people you've dated for brief moments and had time intersect to bring you into their family life for holidays and trap you inside places they knew so well and you found alien, foreboding and escape worthy. It's strange because this movie seems to be so sure of what it is in the first hour, then gradualy loses its faith within itself to take the film to where it needs to go. The hard part is that the start of the movie, the build and the dread is so great that the fact that it doesn't stick a landing hurts worse than a typical movie. So many modern movies seem to have this same malady - the end should be as important as the beginning, after all.