Tuck into The Feast – paranormal gore and sexual corruption in the Welsh hills

Something is wrong with Cadi (Annes Elwy), a Welsh villager who’s been hired as a waitress for an exclusive dinner party in the mountains. She moves around like a zombie, hardly speaks, and her hair’s sodden.

The Feast is the kind of film where no one notices except the camera, which fixes itself on the weirdly slow production of canapés. While husband Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies) is out rabbit hunting, hostess Glenda (a vivid Nia Roberts) is busy fretting about the evening, which will involve, under sufferance, their neighbour Mair (a cringing Lisa Palfrey) as well as Euros (Rhodri Meilir), a sharkish businessman who’s been drilling for oil on their estate.

Shot entirely in Welsh, this pristine debut from Lee Haven Jones has a methodical chill to it, laying steady groundwork for a buffet of grotesqueries. It’s horror-satire, with its eye on environmental plundering, and a demonic revenge to exact. Cadi may once have been a normal person, but seems to have been possessed by the spirit of something: a chthonic deity of some kind? Whatever it is, it’s hacked off.

The detail of the production is wittily inviting, down to the ludicrously expensive artwork on the dining room wall, a blurry abstract of the estate, which thereby flaunts Glenda’s inherited wealth on multiple levels. She has two sons (Julian Lewis Jones, Steffan Cennydd) who are separately dysfunctional – one a recovering drug addict, the other a fitness freak who has somehow forfeited his hospital job and eats raw meat only.

The prospect of an immaculate banquet turning into a grisly nightmare gives the film its lift-off, but Roger Williams’s script instead leaks the air out of the balloon, scene by scene. The place settings are wonky, with mismatched glasses; the food looks revolting. (Rabbit with uncooked fruit? I ask you.) The awkwardness of the social interactions, captured in long master shots, is something you could set your watch by. Still, the film overcommits to its clinical distance at all times, and you could be forgiven for wanting it to be friskier, more rebellious.

The technique may not be quite to my taste, but that’s not to say it isn’t well-achieved, in its glassy-eyed way. There are threats of sexual corruption – the leering attention of the men on Cadi – so it’s not just the land being ravaged that feels like a prompt for revenge. Rather like Pasolini’s Theorem or Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque, this centres on a diabolical intruder turning the house upside down. The difference is that she’s female, and her methods aren’t devious so much as ghoulishly indifferent, as if she’s sleep-walking through her own gory revolution. By dessert, all she’s serving are just deserts.

18 cert, 93 min. In cinemas from Friday