If you’ve ever sat at a tense family meal thinking, “Wow, the vibes are off,” A Banquet is here to reassure you: it can always be worse. Try a daughter who refuses to eat, insists she’s chosen by some cosmic force, and mysteriously never loses weight. Add grief, guilt, generational trauma, and one very stressed mother, then turn the lights down and let it simmer.
Ruth Paxton’s film isn’t a jump-scare buffet; it’s a slow, unnerving course-by-course psychological horror where you’re never quite sure whether you’re watching a possession, a delusion, an eating disorder, or the world’s bleakest coming-of-age ritual. The answer is: yes.
The Setup: Grief, Gasps, and an Empty Plate
We meet Holly (Sienna Guillory) in what might be the most brutal opening five minutes for a “work–life balance” ad: she’s caring for her terminally ill husband at home. One moment she’s feeding him, the next he calmly drinks poison and staggers outside to die in their own backyard, as if taking out the trash and his will to live in one trip.
Smash-cut to: Holly, now a widowed mother, doing the classic “pretend everything is fine or the house of cards will explode” act with her daughters:
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Betsey (Jessica Alexander): older daughter, bright, drifting, on the cusp of university and existential dread.
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Isabelle/Izzy (Ruby Stokes): younger, sidelined, quietly taking notes on how not to handle grief.
A teacher asks Betsey to make a list of what’s important in life. This is the point at which most teens spiral into “I dunno, music and coffee?” Betsey takes the more dramatic route.
She goes to a party, wanders into the woods, encounters something offscreen—cosmic, spiritual, maybe just deeply internal—and comes back transformed. Not in the “new eyeliner and crystals” way. In the “I’m chosen, I’ve seen the future, and also I’m never eating again” way.
The Refusal: Not Eating, Not Dying, Not Explaining
Here’s where the film really sinks its teeth in—ironically, with a character who won’t use hers.
Betsey announces that she can’t eat anymore. Not won’t. Can’t. She says she’s had a vision of a dark future, but in it she’s “special,” and her mother is “a star.” You know, just normal post-party chat.
Holly, correctly, goes straight into:
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Doctors
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Specialists
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Tests
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Scans
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Every kind of clinical opinion money can buy
The diagnosis: “We don’t know.” Betsey isn’t losing weight. Her body shows none of the expected signs of malnutrition. She looks physically fine. Which is… not how starvation works, unless you’re being line-fed by God or the script.
On a realistic level, the movie is playing with the horror of watching a loved one waste away—except Betsey doesn’t. She hovers in this uncanny state where the normal rules of biology seem suspended. It’s unnerving, especially because the film never gives you a neat answer as to why.
Holly: Motherhood as a Slow Psychological Collapse
Sienna Guillory absolutely anchors the movie. Holly is what happens when “good mother” instincts meet cosmic nonsense head-on.
Her emotional arc is basically:
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Concerned: Maybe she’s stressed. Maybe it’s grief. We’ll get help.
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Frightened: No one knows what’s wrong. She’s still not eating.
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Obsessed: Emptying her bank account for solutions, watching every bite, hovering, pushing, begging.
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Unraveling: Sleepless, resentful, fragile, perched on the edge of snapping.
The horror here isn’t a monster popping out of the closet. It’s the quiet, relentless panic of a parent who cannot fix their child and starts wondering if the child is even “fixable” in the normal sense anymore.
And the film is cruelly good at forcing you to sit in that discomfort. There’s no release, no big explanatory exorcism, just Holly slowly eroding in front of you while Betsey calmly talks about destiny instead of calories.
Betsey: Saint, Prophet, Teenager, Monster…?
Jessica Alexander walks a very fine line as Betsey. She could easily have been played as an obvious villain or obvious victim; instead, she’s an unsettling mix of both.
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Sometimes she seems genuinely tormented, like she really has seen some crushing future and is bearing a terrible burden.
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Sometimes she feels manipulative, basking in the attention, the worship, the power of being the family’s gravitational center.
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Sometimes she’s just a teenager, stuck between panic and performance, clinging to this new “identity” because everything else—the death, the expectations, the ordinary path—terrifies her.
Is she possessed? Psychotic? Starving herself as control? Receiving divine or cosmic messages? The film never spells it out, and that ambiguity is the point. It’s not here to give you a diagnostic label; it’s here to make you deeply unsure where faith ends and pathology begins.
Grandma, Folklore, and the Futakuchi-onna
Enter June, Holly’s mother, played with and icy efficiency by Lindsay Duncan—because what this house really needed was another emotionally loaded woman with Opinions.
June shows up, assesses her granddaughter’s behavior, and instead of “this looks like an eating disorder,” she goes straight to Japanese folklore:
Futakuchi-onna – a woman with a second mouth on the back of her head that must be fed constantly, often in secret.
Her argument: Betsey is like that—a kind of monster feeding off the family, particularly Holly. Emotionally, financially, spiritually draining her.
Is this subtle? Not particularly. But it’s deeply creepy and thematically sharp. The idea that a child can become a kind of emotional parasite without anyone meaning harm—or that a mother feels that way—hits hard.
June even offers to take Izzy away, like she’s evacuating the “spare child” from a collapsing emotional war zone. Holly hesitates, then lets her go, which is maybe the best decision anyone makes in the whole film.
The Last Supper (Without Food)
The final stretch of A Banquet is essentially one long, terrible night.
Betsey tells Holly that “something is coming,” and that whatever it is, Holly needs to love and support her through it, no matter what. This is the kind of sentence that should automatically trigger an intervention and three therapists. Instead, Holly does what she’s been doing all along: tries to be the good mother, tries to love her daughter through the madness.
They spend the night together in a suffocating bubble of dread. Then, in the morning, Betsey calmly announces that Holly’s love “made everything possible.”
And then she dies.
No gore. No big exorcism. Just a limp, empty body where a strange, blazing presence used to be. It’s ambiguous whether this is a spiritual fulfillment, a suicide by starvation, or some combination of martyrdom and mental illness. The film doesn’t clarify. It just lets the horror sit there.
The Glow-Up No One Wanted
The final scene is darkly, chillingly poetic.
Holly, broken, wanders into the street with her daughter’s body gone and her purpose ripped out. She collapses under the weight of grief — and then she starts to glow.
Literally.
Is she now the “star” Betsey foresaw in her visions? A chosen vessel? A hallucination? A metaphor? All of the above? The film refuses to explain, which will absolutely infuriate some viewers and thrill others.
Personally, it works. It’s viciously ironic:
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Holly bankrupted herself trying to fix Betsey
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Destroyed her sanity
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Lost her husband, daughter, and the life she planned
And her “reward,” in whatever cosmic scheme Betsey believed in, is to become some kind of luminous… something. Chosen. Special.
Motherhood as transcendence via complete obliteration. Uplifting!
Style and Substance: Slow-Burn with a Side of Starvation
A Banquet isn’t for everyone. It’s:
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Slow, in that “we’re going to sit in this uncomfortable silence until you squirm” way
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Minimal on explicit horror effects
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Heavy on atmosphere, performance, and suggestion
If you need jump scares, clear answers, or a clean “it was a demon” conclusion, you’ll probably hate it. But if you like horror that crawls under your skin and then politely refuses to leave, it’s a feast—pun intended.
The sound design, muted color palette, and suffocating domestic spaces all add to the sense that you’re trapped inside this house with them. There’s nowhere to go but deeper in.
Final Verdict: Starving, But Rich
A Banquet is a horror film that starves you on purpose: of answers, of certainty, of catharsis. In return, it feeds you:
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Excellent performances
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Thoughtful, layered themes about grief, control, and the horror of loving someone you can’t save
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Slow, queasy dread that lingers after the credits
It’s bleak, strange, and at times almost unbearably intimate—but it’s also smart, confident, and quietly vicious.
If you like your horror ambiguous, psychological, and just a little bit cruel toward everyone involved, pull up a chair. Dinner is served. Just… don’t ask what’s on the menu.
