Directed by Ruth Paxton
Written by Justin Bull
Starring Sienna Guillory, Jessica Alexander, Ruby Stokes, Lindsay Duncan
Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes
Select theaters, digital platforms and VOD on 2/18

by Audrey Callerstrom, Associate Editor

It’s hard to talk about a film like a A Banquet, about a teenager who suddenly stops eating, without thinking there is subtext there about eating disorders. Eating disorders have been explored in horror in implicit and explicit ways. Some argue that Drag Me to Hell, about a young woman under a curse, explored eating disorders through the frequent use of vomiting and showing spoiled food. In Shapeless, a woman’s bulimia turns into body horror as her binging and purging results in hallucinations of a mutating body. In A Banquet, Betsey (Jessica Alexander) stops eating. This happens the day after whispers from a  forest draw her away from a high school party and she stares up at a bright red moon. Something is calling her. She doesn’t seem to lose any weight, but she refuses to eat or drink, and even stops needing to use the bathroom. Her mother, Holly (Sienna Guillory), younger sister, Izzy (Ruby Stokes) and grandmother June (Lindsay Duncan) are all baffled.

There’s an undercurrent here about how teenagers do things we don’t understand, but it’s taken a little too literally. We have little doubt that Betsy is possessed by something. And like many teens, it seems like Betsey changes overnight, because she does. She refuses to eat and speaks of a higher purpose, a destiny, a sacrifice. She speaks vaguely of an apocalyptic-like event that is forthcoming. Her once flushed face and shy smile is erased. Her skin becomes grey, her lips chapped white. She spends a lot of time sleeping. Although some of these conversations tend to grow redundant, the best scenes of A Banquet include three strong actors from three different generations (Alexander, Guillory, and Duncan, as daughter, mother, and grandmother, respectively). The underrated Lindsay Duncan swoops in and manages to chew scenery with the few scenes she has. That tends to be Duncan’s way, showing up in small scenes in films to deliver an impactful performance (like in Birdman), and the moment you think to look her up on IMDB to see what else she has been in, her character is off the screen. All of these actors play well off each other, and the film would have served them better if the script built them out more. There’s a correlation between what’s happening with Betsey and what happened with Holly when Holly was young, but what is it? There should also be a connection to the film’s first scene where Betsey watches her father die violently while in Holly’s care, but there isn’t. It seems like the film wanted to start off with some gore, for gore’s sake.

A Banquet is able to coast pretty well on mood and performances, but once it gets close to its end, it gives up. It doesn’t know what direction it wants to go, and it doesn’t convey any new information. Not only that, but the films final two scenes are completely derivative of two other horror films. One of those is Saint Maud, which A Banquet borrows from pretty heavily in its final shot, which doesn’t convey nearly as much horror and surprise as Saint Maud did. Scenes where Holly tries to comfort and control a thrashing, growling Betsey in her bed borrow heavily from The Exorcist. It feels all too familiar. She suddenly behaves like she is possessed, and Holly struggles to control her, all the while questioning if there is anything of her daughter left. 

The idea of someone refusing to eat is such an uncomfortable idea, and A Banquet does pull it off nicely. It’s eerie without having to project any gore. The sounds of food become amplified. Up close, everything looks gross, even worse than pictures of pasta taken in an underlit room with a flash. The noises of food, of eating. It’s not appetizing. It all just looks like wet guts. In her feature film debut, director Ruth Paxton mostly succeeds at smoothing over the gaps in Justin Bull’s script. But as it is, A Banquet is a film that thinks it is building on something, A Grand Reveal, a shock, a twist, but aside from the performances, the film kind of ends in a shrug.