The creepy new trailer has landed for A BANQUET.
The movie is in theaters and On Demand February 18.
Ruth Paxton’s women-led horror sees a mother tested when her daughter insists that her body is no longer her own, but in service to a higher power. Stars Sienna Guillory, Jessica Alexander and Ruby Stokes.
https://www.ifcfilms.com/films/a-banquet
The movie had it’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In Ruth Paxton’s spellbinding debut feature, widowed mother Holly (Sienna Guillory) grapples with eldest daughter Betsey’s (Jessica Alexander) disturbing conviction that her body has become a vessel for an unknown higher power, one that has ominously robbed her of any appetite, and which Betsey believes heralds a cataclysmic upheaval.
At first, her condition is suspected to be an act of adolescent rebellion or a psychological break. But despite her refusal to eat, Betsey loses no weight and gains a growing faith in her newfound and enigmatic sense of purpose. As her daughter’s personality is further subsumed by this affliction, Holly finds herself confronting the boundaries of her own beliefs and the repressed traumas of her past.
Towing the line between discomforting body horror and simmering psychodrama, Paxton skillfully escalates a common domestic dynamic (“You’re not leaving the table until you finish your plate!”) towards the upsetting but profound parental fears of being unable to understand one’s own child, what they want or need, and how to protect them from the external forces of an unforgiving world. Guillory and Alexander are both exceptional in dramatizing these conflicts, as Justin Bull’s intimate screenplay asks them to ricochet between immense emotional extremes.
Combined with stylish photography pervaded by grotesque culinary close-ups and subtle forays into nightmarish surrealism, A Banquet is a disquieting feast from a promising new filmmaker, with images and ideas that leave a potent and lingering aftertaste.
From IndieWire’s TIFF review: “While [‘A Banquet’] is not precisely a horror film, Paxton cleverly uses its expectations and ideas to build her story. It creeps, it chills, it gets under your skin, and though there may be nary a jump scare to be found, there are many scenes that happily hinge on the possibility that something (someone?) is just out of frame and ready to grab you. (Good luck getting through Isabelle’s many ice skating scenes without expecting something horrible to happen; skates are very sharp, don’t you know.) Mouths are everywhere, and close-ups of people eating, kissing, even getting their teeth cleaned, grate and worry and revolt. No wonder Betsey no longer wants to participate in any part of that, thank you very much.”
IndieWire’s Kate Erbland added, “Both Guillory and Alexander come out swinging and never let up, while Stokes and Lindsay Duncan (who appears in the second half as Holly’s pissed-off mother June) gradually grow into their roles and emerge as the film’s MVPs. There’s not a bad turn in the bunch.”
From Variety’s TIFF Review: “Paxton explores layered storytelling methods to further augment the narrative’s moody magnetism through meaningfully conceived aesthetics and spooky soundscapes. She deftly demonstrates a visual and auditory dexterity in crafting and capturing the insular, intimate world these characters inhabit — from the staging of the oppressive familial conflicts in their domestic confines to the conceptualizing of Betsey’s intense fear of food through heightened, sweetened sound design.” – Courtney Howard
