TIFF 2021: A Banquet
TIFF 2021Food horror is not a vast subgenre of horror, but it is one that has potential. Food and digestion can create turbulent cinematic reactions and are well suited for a filmmaker to create memorable iconography. Enter Ruth Paxton’s feature debut A Banquet, which delivers a menu of unnerving psychological terror that revolves around food, providing meals, and eating disorders.
A Banquet opens with a well-shot but a gruesome scene in which devoted mom Holly (Sienna Guillory) witnesses the suicide of her husband. This opening does a lot of the prep work to show the viewer the grief and personal fragility that Holly bears while soldiering on to parent her teenage daughters. Shortly after her father’s death, Betsey (Jessica Alexander) stops eating and speaks of being chosen. All this happens following her snorting some ‘Palcohol’ at a party and staring at a blood-red moon. From there, her behaviour slowly gets odder and creepier and, eventually, rubs off onto her younger sister. The highlight of this psychological descent is the absurd family meal where she indicates that she can’t keep her food down, so she will not eat. After her frustrated mom, thinking she is dealing with anorexia and a problematic teen, reduces her meal bit by bit down to one single pea, Betsey struggles to force down the morsel without retching. It is excellent stuff. Paxton’s eating disorder horror is the centrepiece of A Banquet, and although it is imperfect, she gets quite a bit of stuff right. The viewer constantly gets the visuals of food to remind them that they are in a kitchen-thriller.
Paxton features food becoming grosser and grosser as the film moves along. It makes for an apt metaphor for the film’s mental health messaging – the slow disintegration of shape and vigour does not just belong to out-of-season produce. The chief sticking point of A Banquet is that the nature of the horror/possession impacting Betsey is decidedly vague throughout, which diminishes the level of peril and intensity to a degree. Thus, her psychological disintegration does not entirely work. It is contrived and mysterious without enough clues to tell the audience what is going on.
What is particularly effective, though, is Holly’s mental and emotional exhaustion. As a parent, Holly is presented as having done a fantastic job being a present and active part of her children’s lives. The girls seem well adjusted, and she has a terrific relationship with them. She is a dialled-in and supportive caretaker. We see it in her sticking around to watch her daughters practise, we see it in her care at her husband’s bedside, and we see it in her teach-and-trust based parenting of Betsey in issues of alcohol and sexual relations. She seems like an awesome mom. However, when Betsey stops eating and avoids making decisions about where to go to university, Holly’s is hit with a helplessness that she has no idea how to manage. This is the disintegration of her mental wellness and decision-making – and it is the best thing that the film has going for it. A Banquet has grander – more food-related, troubled-teen horror – at its centre, but the film's best character, performance, and messaging lies in Sienna Guillory’s work as she confronts empty-nest uselessness. The film fails to horrorise this emotional challenge as a film like The Babadook did with its emotional core, but Holly is a particularly strong element of Paxton’s film.
A Banquet makes a few missteps. In the opening scene, the father’s demise positions Holly’s character arc, but the daughters are curiously absent. They are missing from the scene, and their relationship with their father is scarcely mentioned in the film's remainder. Despite this being a female-driven horror, this significant male figure becomes a blind spot in the film. It is an automatically felt absence, which weakens their characters’ arcs via omission.
Further, despite a great work with the actresses, solid generation of suspense, and imagery of food, Paxton's direction fosters a cold, uncompromising aesthetic. There is a harshness in the cold lighting and stark digital photography. It works to a point, but one wonders if some moments of warm, softer lighting would have contributed to A Banquet’s foundation in maternal care and the loving parent-daughter dynamic that ends up getting pushed to the brink.