In The Feast, Lee Haven Jones offers an atmospheric eco-horror that forefronts slow but effective unease in anticipation of the final act’s body horror lashings to the benefit of this short and sharp feature debut. At once both novel and yet somehow familiar (it does feel reminiscent of recent British folk horror films such as In the Earth, Men, A Banquet, and You’re Not My Mother, although in my opinion superior to all of these), this Welsh-language critique of the industrialised rape and pillaging of the natural landscape takes contemporary capitalist-driven-politics to task by asking the only question left come the logical extreme of our planet’s current trajectory – ‘after you’ve taken everything, what will be left?’
The superficial and materially privileged family of a Welsh MP named Gwyn is hosting a dinner party, an event to which they’ve invited their local neighbor Mair, as well as shady business partner, Euros – a conscious orchestration to facilitate the latter’s purchase of the Mair’s bountiful farming land. To aid in proceedings, Gwyn and his trophy wife and former local farm-girl Glenda have hired help from the local pub in the form of the quiet but strangely bold Cadi. Cadi’s presence within the house, her often somnambulistic mannerisms and near-silent engagement, immediately command the attention of all (particularly Gwyn and Glenda’s two lustful teenage sons) as her apparent distaste for the soulless modernism of the family’s house and clear unease around the sentient suit-and-tie that is Euros betrays her rural ways. In fact, the notion of Cadi being a country-born girl might in fact be very literal, with her arrival at the house occurring simultaneously with the rapacious drilling of a nearby mineral deposit and the discovery of an unknown cave system, the film opening with the destructive imagery of an oily and blackened drill penetrating fresh green grass. Beginning with this image, The Feast announces itself as a fundamentally symbolic text concerned with humanity’s ravaging of the environment, an act which in this instance results in the bloody but (apparently) accidental death of an unfortunate contractor working the ruinous equipment.
As the facade of Gwen’s family begins to crumble and the insidious yet alluring Cadi begins to overstretch her role as a seemingly amiable servant to bloody extremes, The Feast spins an almost folkloric tale of an environmental avenger sworn to maintain balance in a world populated by an apparently masochistic, or at the very best, indifferent populace. In a world where profit is put before environmental stability and preservation, the real monster here is closer to home than the murderous ‘mother nature’ figure that Cadi comes to chillingly represent.
Notes from the Multiplex 