the thing that kills me the most
2020 · 5m · USA
Directed by Jay Giampietro
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, tense
A weekly dinner party where one guest's mounting frustration becomes a study in social endurance.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
NYFF selection about a dinner party freeloader as 'impressionistic fugue' — five minutes of art-fugue prestige for an annoyance complaint, and somehow I'm into it. The audacity is the texture.
Giampietro's NYFF selection of an impressionistic fugue about dinner-party social dynamics is the Hong Sang-soo gesture done as a five-minute prestige miniature, and the festival placement is the highest possible signal. A rare formal sympathy with Östlund's social-cringe lineage.
57th NYFF Official Selection at 5:13 — that's a serious imprimatur for a dinner-party annoyance piece, and the NYFF guide language ('impressionistic fugue,' 'language itself rendered abstract') tells you the formal approach is closer to Hong Sang-soo than to social comedy. Cast of nine Julianos suggests a real ensemble texture.
Festivals
- New York Film Festival 2019