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A psychological horror tale built around a mysterious eating disorder and unusually fraught mother-daughter dynamics, Ruth Paxton’s feature debut, A Banquet, shares key ingredients with several much-discussed recent indies by and/or about women, from Swallow to, in its end-of-everything theme, Amy Seimetz’s arresting She Dies Tomorrow.
Paxton acquits herself well, making the most of Sofia Stocco’s chilly interiors and some committed performances from stars Jessica Alexander and Sienna Guillory. But Justin Bull’s screenplay comes up short, failing to adequately capture the depth of its teen’s encounter with the abyss — her anorexia is the aftermath of an apocalyptic revelation — and to integrate it into the more comprehensible domestic tensions that serve as the plotless film’s only framework.
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A Banquet
Venue: Toronto Film Festival (Discovery)
Cast: Sienna Guillory, Jessica Alexander, Ruby Stokes, Kaine Zajaz, Lindsay Duncan
Director: Ruth Paxton
Screenwriter: Justin Bull
Guillory plays Holly, who recently nursed her husband during an illness that he ended with a gruesome suicide. His death was witnessed by their daughter Betsey (Alexander) but the two never speak of the tragedy when, some time later, the story begins in earnest.
Betsy’s a high schooler near graduation, and her counselor urges her to look deep within while deciding what to do next. “What Really Interests Me,” she writes at the top of a journal page. But the page remains empty. Later, she’s at a party when she tires of friends’ jokes and walks out to the edge of nearby woods. A moon nearly as red as her lipstick mesmerizes her, and she comes home a changed girl.
She’s tingly, queasy, uneasy in ways she can’t (or won’t) explain at first. When Holly notices her lack of appetite, she’ll work quickly through concern and support to anger: “Entitled middle-class white girls” get anorexia, Holly snaps at one point, not seeming to recognize that entitled middle-class white girls also grow up to prepare the kind of photogenic meals she cooks, and a mother with more insight might offer her appetite-deficient child something more comforting than beautifully grilled sardines.
Holly is far from uncaring, but something is wrong in the cavelike home she has made for Betsey and younger daughter Isabelle (Ruby Stokes), where dark walls and quiet routines insulate the family from the outside world. The only real witness to the unfolding psychodrama is Holly’s mother, June (Lindsay Duncan), who, while not a fairy tale-grade wicked old crone, is more skeptical than loving. Years ago, she was also a mother with a mentally ill child. Has that child passed illness on to her own daughter, or is Betsey, as June suspects, shrewdly playing a part for some secret reason?
That question is partly answered six months later, when Betsey’s hunger strike has left her weighing exactly what she did when she began. She’s already told her family what she saw in that red moon: “I can feel what’s coming for us. It’s just darkness,” she says, not unhappily, and her awareness of the meaninglessness of life now threatens to spread to Isabelle and Holly.
This kind of doom contagion evolved into a constantly reinterpretable thriller in She Dies Tomorrow. But it’s more inert here, never resonating with the real world and its many reasons for nihilism, that sit outside the film’s frame. Nor does Bull’s script persuasively draw connections between one generation’s actions and the next one’s wounds. Unless, that is, it’s quietly arguing that the simple act of perpetuating the species is the real crime. Maybe Bull is thinking of reproduction, not nurturing emotion, when he has Betsey deliver a killer punchline to her mom: “Your love made all of this possible.”
Full credits
Venue: Toronto Film Festival (Discovery)
Production companies: Tea Shop Productions, Riverstone Pictures, Rep8
Cast: Sienna Guillory, Jessica Alexander, Ruby Stokes, Kaine Zajaz, Lindsay Duncan
Director: Ruth Paxton
Screenwriter: Justin Bull
Producers: Leonora Darby, Mark Lane, Nik Bower, James Harris, Laure Vaysse
Executive producers: Deepak Nayar, Jeremy Baxter, Justin Bull, Patrick Fischer, Richard Kondal
Director of photography: David Liddell
Production designer: Sofia Stocco
Costume designer: Kirsty Halliday
Editor: Mátyás Fekete
Composer: CJ Mirra
Casting director: Carla Stronge
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