Mark Reviews Movies: A BANQUET

A Banquet, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 17, 2022

Everything does and will come to an end, and that's the central, underlying concern/fear of A Banquet. In it, a grieving family, intimately aware of the finality of things, tries to make sense of life, but there's nothing except death to be found in the here and now—or in the later and inevitable.

Obviously, this is a dark and nihilistic tale, written by Justin Bull and directed by Ruth Paxton. It offers no comfort or hope, from its bleak prologue until its very final—both in that it's the end and in that the ending is about as definitive as one could be—moment. As for the story between those scenes, the filmmakers struggle to connect the feeling of overwhelming despair and the ideas behind the main mystery to anything recognizably, let alone sympathetically, human.

The movie opens with Holly (Sienna Guillory), a mother of two daughters and the wife/caretaker of a very ill man. The husband decides to end matters on his own terms, and the couple's elder daughter Betsey (Jessica Alexander) arrives home just in time to witness the gruesome consequences of that choice.

At some point soon after, Holly tries to keep life going as normally as possible for herself and her daughters. The younger sister Isabelle (Ruby Stokes) is in need of braces, and Betsey appears to be back into a routine of school and hanging out with friends.

She had to take some time off from classes after her father's death, and an advisor at school suggests Betsey puts some serious thought into her academic and professional future. While at a party at the house of her boyfriend Dominic (Kaine Zajaz), the teen wanders outside for a cigarette, follows the blood-red moon in the sky toward a nearby forest, and returns in a daze. Betsey collapses, and in the proceeding days, she refuses to eat—choking upon swallowing even a single pea.

Something has changed for Betsey. The doctor finds nothing physically amiss with her and offers Holly a psychiatric referral for her daughter. Betsey, though, doesn't think anything is wrong. In fact, she has come to the conclusion that has gained some unique insight into the meaning of life, the facts of what happens after death, and the future of the planet. As it turns out, none of it is particularly cheery. It's basically an existential nightmare.

The mix of ideas and tone is undeniably effective, and Paxton, making her feature debut, displays a strong sense of creating a cohesive atmosphere of gloom and uncertainty. That mood permeates everything here, from seemingly ordinary moments (The dinner at which Betsey reveals her newfound aversion to food provides some tension, not only in what might happen, but also in how Holly could react) to the performances, which are generally and consistently on the same wavelength of unspoken misery.

Much of what's happening here remains unspoken or between the lines, especially when it comes to what seems to be the driving force of Betsey's transformation and this story: grief. A lot of the teenage character's newly acquired understanding of the world sounds like young person's first encounter with the reality and idea of death. It starts to infect others, including Isabelle, who stops finding joy in ice skating or much of anything, and Dominic, who quickly escapes from the house after having a single conversation with Betsey.

The girl is convinced she is a prophet of sorts and that fate has chosen her family as the catalyst for some cosmic event. At first, Holly believes her older daughter is suffering from anorexia, but the evidence contradicts that conclusion. Holly's difficult mother June (Lindsay Duncan) simply thinks the girl is making a selfish cry for attention, and perhaps, Paxton's strident, uncompromising devotion to mood gets in the way of that potential doubt about Betsey's beliefs, proclamations, and certainty of her significance in some supernatural or cosmic upheaval of nature.

The issues might simply be more foundational, though. Bull's screenplay certainly addresses, confronts, and toys with matters of faith and philosophy in direct and/or unnerving ways, but the characters and, hence, the movie's ability to bring those notions to a personal, grounded level are secondary to the ideas and the puzzle surrounding them. Because all of this feels like a game of what and whom we should believe, our understanding of and sympathy for what Holly and her children are experiencing as a result of grief, as well as the hopelessness of the cause of that grief, are undermined.

As a piece of existential horror, A Banquet is admirable for its dedication to focusing on the helplessness and hopelessness of its story—and matters far beyond those specifics. The movie's bigger ambitions, though, overshadow the narrative's more intimate and down-to-earth elements—the ones that might have made this a genuinely haunting tale of very real, very personal despair.

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