The Dinner Party
2021 · 17m · UK
Directed by Simon Neal
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tense
A self-centered thirty-something dreads a long evening with his wife's friends and plots cruel little tricks to send them home early — but as the night wears on the joke curdles and he is forced to confront some painful truths about himself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A neutered adaptation of something that was probably sharper on the page—the premise (asshole sabotages dinner party, faces consequences) is exactly the kind of morality-play setup that makes you want to look away, and the film seems to know it but doesn't quite have the nerve to lean into the ugliness.
Neal's compression of Ferris's interior monologue into physical performance and spatial tension shows real understanding of how literary cruelty translates to cinema; the single-location pressure cooker demands exactness in every cut and glance, and the film earns its tonal shift from comedy to reckoning through disciplined mise-en-scène.
The turning point lives in one unguarded moment where the protagonist's mask slips during a small gesture—that's where Neal trusts the actor and the audience to do the work, and it's the kind of quiet choice that makes a chamber piece breathe on a shoestring budget.
Reviews
The viciousness is pinpoint acute and bracing.
More anxiety-inducing than films four times its length — an insufferable-man-core gem.
Festivals
- Norwich Film Festival 2021