Lee Haven Jones, The Feast (2021): A Tale of Retaliation

Abstract

Lee Haven Jones’s 2021 film The Feast would be yet another witch’s tale were it not for its contemplative aesthetics and its underlying appeals to an idealized, pristine state of nature reclaiming its due. The intrusion of a witch in an elegant family during a formal dinner actuates the retaliation of a land desecrated and exploited by modernity and industrialism. The witch’s – and, through her, the land’s – revenge is enacted through punctual paroxysms of body horror, all the more striking since the overall atmosphere of the film is one of silence and morbid contemplation of the toxic interpersonal dynamics between the protagonists. Punished by the witch for their respective sins, while she, in the meantime, seems to fill, in a horribly distorted way, their individual gaps and failures, the members of the family are killed one by one, in what is shown not as gratuitous aggression but as the justified vengeance of a discarded past, a past symbolized by the land on which the family’s house is built as well as by the witch herself. The fact that the entire film, a Sianel 4 Cymru production, is in Welsh, a language by essence striving for survival in a globalized world, must also not be overlooked as a meta-discourse on cultural resilience. This article examines the dynamics of duality inherent to The Feast, from the intertwining of past and present to the aesthetic and narrative contrast between contemplative moments and peaks of extreme violence. I will also consider the manner in which the film eventually complexifies these dynamics of duality and eludes simplistic characterization, allowing the viewer and the critic to interpret the ultimate destruction of the family as fair retaliation.