The Dinner Party

SilverSun Pictures

Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment

Region free

This deep and dark film explores people’s reactions to an impending disaster – they know or suspect there is trouble brewing, but how do they handle it? Their reactions are mixed, but how would any ordinary person handle such a crisis? In this respect it is a very uncomfortable film.

Angela and Joel have been together for a couple of years now, but Joel wants to break up because Angela is becoming stranger by the day. She is increasingly possessive and demanding, irrational, and addicted to prescription drugs. She has drawers full of these in her bathroom. They have invited some of their friends to a dinner party and Angela has told some people that she and Joel will commit suicide later so they can be together forever. Most of their friends don’t take her too seriously – as Freddy says, she is “ a drama queen, a weirdo”. They turn up anyway for the free feed.

Before the party Angela has taken her friend Maddy to buy heroin with which she and Joel will overdose after the party. Maddy is seriously worried. Angela can only afford enough heroin for one strong dose so Maddy goes back to buy another dose for Angela. She arranges with the drug dealer, though, to fill the syringe with sugar solution.

Joel invites an old girlfriend, Skye, to the party to make up the numbers as he doesn’t have many friends of his own left. He fully intends to leave Angela that night after the party and obviously knows nothing of Angela’s demented plan. Angela feels threatened by Skye and orders her out of the house. She then spikes Joel’s coffee with Rohypnol and he collapses. Freddy is sure Angela has spiked Joel’s coffee but he and Matt leave when Angela tells everyone that Freddy has taken some of her valium and accuses him of spiking the coffee instead. Maddy is the only one left, and in spite of her worries about Joel’s health and Angela’s mental state she is persuaded that he will be all right and leaves. She visits Matt, who is about to call the police, and points out to him that they will all be arrested for manslaughter if the police realise they were there and did nothing to stop the suicides. Everyone just waits to see what happens.

Angela injects Joel with one syringe then injects herself with the other, believing they both have a heroin overdose. Because one syringe contains sugar solution, one of them will die and the other will live. The survivor and the guests will have to face the consequences.

The story is rather slow-moving, but I can’t see any other way that director Scott Murden could have built up the tension so well. We are aware from the start that Angela is mentally disturbed but Murden uses little snippets here and there to reinforce the idea and give examples of her obsessive behaviour. One such is when she insists that Joel change his clothes before the party and goes into a sulk when he refuses. Her barbed comments to the guests and her almost vicious rudeness to Skye when she finds Skye is Joel’s old girlfriend reinforce her illness. Incidents like these also explain why the guests are happy to depart one by one and leave Joel to his fate.

The cast has been well selected from unknowns. Lara Cox as Angela is quite chilling as the smiling but insane “white witch”. In common with a lot of the best independent films, quality acting and direction has overcome the low budget.

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This review will appear in Volume 3 No. 4 of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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