Paula Hammond - Features EditorEvery director who aims to make a horror movie, should be forced to watch The Haunting. Because what Robert Wise knew, is that it’s what you don’t show, that gives your audience nightmares. Slashers and SFX are fine, if you’re aiming to gross-out, but there’s nothing more unnerving than a slow-burn horror that seeps into your psyche.
Lee Haven Jones’ The Feast is exactly that sort of film. Made entirely in the Welsh language, The Feast (Gweldd) unfolds over the course of one evening, as a wealthy family gathers for a sumptuous dinner in their ostentatious house in the mountains. The guests include a local businessman and a neighbouring farmer, and the unspoken aim of the evening is to secure a business deal to mine in the surrounding countryside. When a mysterious young woman (the beguiling Annes Elwy) arrives to be their waitress for the evening, her quiet yet disturbing presence begins to unravel their lives—slowly, deliberately, and with devastating consequences.
Steeped in Welsh folklore, The Feast offers an unsettling lesson in respecting your heritage and remaining connected to your roots. With its eerie sound design and bold cinematography, this is a film that blends gorgeous visuals, top-notch performances, and deft direction, to deliver that rare thing: a genuinely terror-filled horror.
If your tastes run to the gory, there’s plenty of that too—especially as the film builds towards its inevitable climax. But these moments seem like something added merely to get bums on seats. The underlying tale is a much subtler affair, with echoes of Wicker Man and Midsommar, and all those folk stories we learnt at our mother’s knee.
The Feast is an unsettling, thought-provoking, and masterful piece of filmmaking.
