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The horror movie, The Feast Movie Recommendation and Explanation. The Feast has A LOT… A LOT A LOT A LOT to say. But I’ll be darned if I understand even a hint of it! hahahah. Nah, we can figure this movie out together. Alright? We’ll talk it through here after we walk through what occurred in the film, and then we’ll see if we can piece that CRAZY ending together, shall we? Brilliant. I knew you’d come around.
Director, Lee Haven Jones, and cinematographer, Bjørn Ståle Bratberg, and screenplay scribe, Roger Williams, have teamed up to create a crazy story that is 99% atmospherics, and 1% action. But when that action kicks in… watch out, because I wouldn’t be too surprised if this movie walks out into the theater and hunts a few audience goers to boot. The story tells about a well-to-do family who are throwing a dinner party. Cadi (Annes Elwy), a local who has been hired to help with the preparations, watches on as this weird and privileged family seems to self destruct in wild and bizarre ways. This movie isn’t for the faint of heart. So watcher beware…
The Feast Walk Through
Let’s do this quickly as I definitely don’t have the patience to slow walk this thing through – because I want to get to the end and the juice of this explanation. But, believe it or not, you already have everything you need to figure this thing out all on your own. I promise.
Alright, the story, like I said, is all about a small little, but fancy, dinner party. We kick it off the movie with establishing shots walking us through the fact that everyone in this particular family… is broken. Gweirydd (played by Sion Alun Davies), son1, the triathlon aspirationalist, is hyper-impressed with his own looks and sexuality. Guto (played by Steffan Cennydd), son2, is a druggie, party wishing, London longing, teen, trapped in his parent’s house when he’d rather be out and about, on his own. And their mother, Glenda (played by Nia Roberts), who is focused on her piles of money, the art, the house, and the clothes that come with said money. And her husband, Gwyn (played by Julian Lewis Jones), who, as a member of parliament, kills things. Animal-things, land-things, spirit things. He’s great at killing things. (Did you notice that Gwyn actually didn’t shoot the rabbits? He caught them in snares, and lies about how he shot them throughout the rest of the movie.)
Cadi has been hired for the evening, to come and help Glenda make the meal and conduct the various ministrations necessary to hit this three-point shot of a night from the half court line. She has recently lost someone in her family. Heck. She lost a lot more than someone. But we’ll get to that bit later. She’s here to help. Or something. Where was I? Oh, right, and there are two other members of our small cast… Euros (played by Rhodri Meilir, and Mair (played by Lisa Palfrey). Euros is a developer… sort of a “optimizer” of people’s properties. Basically he’s a miner in search of valuable land to profit from – and that is critical to understanding this movie. And Mair, she’s the neighbor next door. Her husband is busy helping with a car that went into a lake, but he’ll be along soon enough. Got it? So, an MP, his broken family, Euros the land investor, and the next door neighbor.
But something isn’t all right with Cadi. Yes. Definitely not. She’s quiet, constantly watching, and this “help” she is supposed to be providing Glenda? Yeah, not really happening. Next thing we know she’s following Guto out into the woods to collect mushrooms… you know, of the psychedelic variety. But he’s been getting weird slashes on his feet, and shins, so? Maybe they’ll help with his pain? No idea. Where are these cuts coming from? Put a pin on that. Eventually Euros (this name is funny to you, RIGHT? I mean, do I have to literally point out every single little detail in this entire movie to you? No, you got that bit. Good. Mr. Money, the developer, Euros. Right, I agree, it’s funny.) arrives and hands Gwyn cash, like straight up, a wad of cash. Why? Because it is all about his map of interesting places in the region worth investigating for geological digs. Petroleum, gems, gold? Euros is here to develop this region. But today the digging stopped after a miner got sick at a dig site. ON A COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE, they discovered caves deep in the ground out at The Rise. The Rise… put another pin on that detail.
We quickly learn that the reason for the dinner is really focused… It isn’t neighbors just catching up. It isn’t a regular dinner occurrence. This particular feast has been arranged solely because a valuable deposit has been found over at The Rise. And it crosses over from this family’s land, and heads over into Mair’s land. Euros has literally paid Gwyn for an introduction to Mair – solely that he can pitch her on allowing him to drill on her land. Got it? But it is local custom that The Rise is where “she” is resting… and she shouldn’t be awakened. Who is she? No idea, but she doesn’t seem like someone we should all be messing with. In the mean time, the dinner really isn’t going swimmingly. Mair isn’t really very interesting in letting Euros have at her land… and besides, she is pretty content just farming the land. It provides a decent and honest life. Which, Euros, Gwyn, and Glenda all sneer at. Mair and her husband have financial difficulties, and everyone knows about that. This development would really change her life substantially.
The boys are uninterested in the dinner, and after one outburst or another, they leave. And Cadi, unnoticed by anyone, slips out. She finds Guto, his legs bleeding prodigiously now… and covered in maggots. (What is with the movies of late and the maggots?!?! GAH!) Which, she helps him out… (pardon me whilst I gag into a bucket) by getting rid of the maggots. And she takes him out into the forest. Actually, specifically, to The Rise. Why? Think! You’ve got this!! And then she returns to the house, and entices Mister Sexuality – Gweirydd – into coming with her into the woods. (He really didn’t stand a chance, did he?) And she convinces him to have sex with her, even though his brother is right there, dying, writhing in pain. Did we mention that she inserted glass inside of her? Yeah, this chick is out for some blood. What is Cadi’s DEAL??
Eventually Mair leaves, and loudly lets everyone there know that she wants nothing to do with this development they are wanting to do on her land. But when she leaves, something important happens. On her way back to the lake, which is where her husband stopped to help, she learns that someone has died in the lake. Specifically Cadi. Right before the movie started, on her way to the house, Cadi crashed her car into the lake and died. Did you notice that her hair was wet at the start of the film? Yeah, there’s a reason for that. That is because she just walked out of a lake… or her soul did anyway. Get that? Cadi is dead. “If Cadi returned, then she would need a body to live in.” She is a ghost that is haunting this movie and tormenting these individuals that are hellbent on all kinds of evil. You caught that right? Please tell me that clicked. If it didn’t, then that should help you in understanding this movie significantly.
Meanwhile, this movie is going off the rails. Euros is finding himself with an insatiable appetite, and is eating literally everything he sees. At one point, he has his face buried deep into a plate of food, and was just eating voraciously. At the same time, Cadi takes Gwyn – who is hearing sounds and screeches that aren’t there – and walks him back to his wife’s special room for relaxing. She hands him a skewer from their dinner, and in an effort to stop the screeching, shoves the skewer into his ear. And, I want to be super clear, if you are hearing things, shoving a skewer deep into your ear will make the sounds stop 10 out of 10 times. It’s a guaranteed fix. Just don’t read the fine print on that particular transaction. So Gwyn is dead. We have a son probably down. And another definitively incapacitated… and Gweirydd actually carries his brother back to the house, and their mother tells them, “How many times have I warned you not to go to The Rise?!?” Oh come on… she of all people should speak. After that, Euros doesn’t notice it when she starts slicing meat off of her son’s now severed leg, and places it in front of him. WAAHT? Yeah, everyone is going off the deep end now. She then ties Euros to a chair and shoots him with a shotgun.
With pretty much everyone now dead, Glenda piles all the bodies in the yard and lights them on fire. She then slits her own throat in the kitchen. Cadi then takes her body, and adds it to the pile before walking back out to the field. And if you notice, the movie began and ended at the exact same spot… the drilling location. It is where the first person became ill. And then, after everyone was dead, she led us back to the drilling location. Why? Exactly. Because this is the point of the entire movie. This movie was a eco-horror flick, with a warning. A warning we’d all do well to listen to.
The Feast Movie Recommendation and Explanation
First, if you think you’ve seen this house before, you might have. The house Tŷ Bywyd, is the same house that Amanda Seyfriend and Kevin Bacon shot in for You Should Have Left. It’s a Welsh house in the countryside of a small town called Llanbister. When you shoot a film on a budget, like The Feast had, you have to ring as much out of the environment, the setting, and the experience as possible. The house is a modern idea, it is all angles and lines. It is blacks. And it’s whites. It is contrast and geometry. It is the opposite of the forest and the fields of the Welsh countryside. So, immediately, we have two characters in the movie we need to account for. We have the rivers, the forests, and the fields. And we have man’s intrusion into said fields and countryside. Make sense? The setting here is so evocative.
Next we have Cadi. She is central to this movie. And as we mentioned in the walkthrough, she arrives at the house – wet. Because she crashed into the lake and died. As she moves through the house, she leaves dirt stains. Dirt on the table cloth. The walls. The floor. (Pretty great chilling effect that cost them 2 minutes of man power to pull off.) And it declares that the forest is invading man’s sanctuary. Right? It is literally walking into the space that man has cordoned off and declared as theirs.
Now, The Rise is critical to the movie. The Rise is a haunted location that worries the locals, and has for generations. So much so that Glenda’s parents sang songs about the hauntings and the locale in question. The hauntings of this location are just a generic manifestation of more specific, enigmatic folklore that tell more detailed stories. Right? The Feast pulls from very specific myths, and specific haunting stories, and generalizes them into a story that pits man against nature. Actually no. It pits nature against man. It tells a story about nature having had enough and are fighting back.
In searching for Welsh nightmarish folklore that might fit this story and help us make sense of it all, I didn’t find anything that matched perfectly. There is a story about a woman made of flowers, that seems like it could at least tangentially be connected. But regardless, if we look at who survives this story, and who doesn’t, we learn more than we ever would be studying myth and legend. OH? WHY IS THAT, TAYLOR? So glad you asked random internet visitor. Because everyone dies. EXCEPT for one particular person… Mair. Mair escapes. Why does she escape Cadi’s wrath? She escapes because she is happy to settle with farming the land. She refused to sell the rights to strip-mine The Rise… right? She stood her ground and refused to napalm the land. She lives. The rest of the family, that had already sold out, they all die because they have walked away from protecting the earth.
But I definitely wouldn’t go so far as to say this movie is a 100% liberal, eco-friendly, sort of retread. That is an obvious reading of the film. I would say that the movie is speaking more about the negative, than the positive. It is saying, look, living a “modern” life, an “enlightened” sort of life isn’t as modern or as enlightened as we think it is. We have a glorious brick and cement life, we have technology that supports us and does our bidding. But we aren’t living as enlightened a life as we think we are. Why? Look at their family dynamics. They are dying to get away from each other, hell, Guto even talked about killing his parents. Yes, living in a hut house, under the ground, and working all day from sun up to sun down to farm might be technically archaic, but living and working alongside your family, and supporting each other towards each other’s survival drives towards a common good. (Never mind child mortality and lack of hospital and vaccinations…) But it forced families to work together. Modernity definitely has its own drawbacks. And a propensity to strip-mine the earth for our own betterment might be a symptom of a deeper disease that modernity has become too myopic to even notice.
Final Thoughts on The Feast
Mankind is so hellbent on technology’s unending advancement that we never ask…should we… only, can we? It is obvious right now that Facebook’s echo chamber has created divides and divisiveness across society the likes of which we have never seen before. Our excitement for the tech overrode any sense of should we. But now that we successfully accomplished this technical leap, and literally BILLIONS of people frequent Facebook daily… do you think we should have? No! We definitely should not have. But that box o’ Pandora has already been opened. There’s no going back. Will we learn from this mistake? No, we absolutely will not.
If you have a piece of property, and it is 300 acres of prime real estate, do you sell it and turn it into suburban condos? Or do you put it in a trust and lock it in as natural space for years to come? Well, one scenario is better for the planet, and our collective consciousness, and the other is better for your individual pocket book. It’s very difficult to consider the needs of society over the needs of the individual. Generally speaking, left to one’s own devices, most will move in the direction of one’s own interests. And that, in effect, will cause something known as the tragedy of the commons. (One sheep farmer in an open field, not a problem. Three sheep farmers in an open field, mmm maybe a problem as they all have their sheep over graze in order to “get theirs”.) But yes, The Feast is tangentially saying something about global warming… and care for the planet. I think though, the more indicting of a message is our senseless chasing of technology and a more modern way of life. Like it’s some sort of good and natural end. Worse, any objection to the “natural” progression of technology (which, I should point out, is antithetical to even the simplest idea of technology), we frame that person as a Luddite. Can I be opposed to Facebook, to social media, to AI, to our ever deepening extremes of technology and NOT be some sort of Mennonite?
Since this “natural progression” of technology can’t be assuaged – maybe the earth should finally go on the offense. The Ents should wake, marshal their forces, and strike back finally. Or Cadi should come for us all, one by one. Not sure which would be worse.
Edited by: CY
