If you’ve ever watched a posh dinner party scene in a movie and thought, “Everyone here deserves something terrible,” The Feast is the film that looks you dead in the eye and says, “Say less.”
Lee Haven Jones’ Welsh-language folk horror is a slow, simmering, absolutely savage little banquet of eco-vengeance, class critique, and bodily fluids. It’s the kind of movie where the countryside feels more alive than most of the humans, the rabbits are more sympathetic than the hosts, and the hired help might actually be an ancient goddess in a borrowed corpse.
So yes, it’s delightful.
A Dinner Party from Environmental Hell
We’re in a sleek, sterile house dropped into the Welsh countryside like a spaceship full of bad decisions. Inside it lives:
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Gwyn – a politician/businessman hybrid, i.e. a walking red flag in a tailored shirt
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Glenda – his wife, who inherited the land and wears her guilt under expensive fabrics
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Guto – their drug-addled son, currently losing a fight with an axe and his own leg
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Gweirydd – their triathlon-obsessed other son, whose diet is 90% raw meat and 10% pathology
They’re hosting a dinner party for:
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Euros – a businessman who’s been drilling the land for minerals
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Mair – a neighboring farmer from Glenda’s past, whose land they’d very much like to exploit
To cook and serve, Glenda hires a quiet local girl named Cadi. Cadi shows up drenched, silent, wide-eyed, and acting just off enough that in any normal universe someone would say, “Hmm, perhaps this is not your average temp worker.”
Instead, she’s handed a knife and put in charge of dinner. Bold move.
Cadi: The Help from the Other Side
Cadi doesn’t say much, but she does a lot. She drifts around the house like a ghost with a union grievance, watching the family with cold curiosity.
Little things start going wrong:
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Guto drops an axe on his foot, which goes from “small cut” to “necrotic nightmare” with alarming speed.
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Gwyn gets strange pains and piercing noise in his head whenever he confronts Cadi.
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A pristine tablecloth suddenly stains with mud when rabbits are shot outside.
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A bottle of wine explodes in Euros’ hand right after he mouths off at Cadi.
There’s a sense that reality itself is protesting, like the house is wired directly into the land and the land is furious.
Then Cadi takes a shard of broken glass and calmly appears to insert it into her vagina, which is one of those “okay, so we’re not in normal psychological horror territory anymore” moments. That shard will come back. Horribly.
Cadi is less a character and more an avatar: a vessel for something old, angry, and deeply unimpressed with these people and their mining permits.
Rich People, Poor Choices
The real horror here—before the gore even kicks in—is the family’s relationship with the land and the people around them.
The true purpose of the dinner party is not friendship, or reconciliation, or even social climbing. It’s sales:
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Gwyn and Glenda want Mair to sign away her land for exploratory drilling.
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Euros is there to help persuade and profit.
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“The Rise,” the primary target, is a hill Mair believes to be the resting place of a local goddess.
Mair, sensibly, says absolutely not. The Rise is sacred ground, children are warned away from it, and no one wants to be the one who pokes the mythological bear.
Glenda, doing her best impression of a woman who has never listened to a story in her life, sneers at it all as superstition. Which is, of course, exactly what you want to say about something you don’t understand on land you’re already plundering.
If you’ve ever watched rich people talk about “maximizing the potential” of a place, The Feast is the horror-movie version of the land quietly saying, “Right. About that.”
Folk Horror as Slow Poison
This is not a jump-scare-a-minute film. It’s a slow burn that turns into a full-blown inferno in the last act. If you’re patient, it rewards you with:
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Beautiful, precise cinematography of the Welsh landscape
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A soundscape full of creaks, whispers, and nature groaning awake
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Gradual psychological unraveling that feels earned, not cheap
The folk horror here is about transgression: the arrogance of carving up something sacred for profit and assuming there’ll be no bill to pay. Cadi/the goddess is less interested in spooking them than in… correcting them.
It’s like The Wicker Man but with fewer songs, more maggots, and significantly worse dinner conversation.
The Sons: Two Courses of Rot
Guto and Gweirydd are walking symptoms of their parents’ world:
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Guto self-medicates his way through family expectations, drugs, and despair. He wants out, but can’t manage it. His leg injury goes from bad to “this is why we don’t inject unidentified mushrooms, king” very fast.
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Gweirydd is all discipline, raw flesh, and repressed depravity. We learn via a drugged, half-rotting Guto that he was kicked out of his hospital job for raping comatose patients. So yes, if you were feeling any sympathy, the film snatches that away.
Cadi lures Gweirydd and his axe to the Rise, where Guto lies helpless. In one of the nastiest sequences, she manipulates Gweirydd into amputating his brother’s necrotic leg, like she’s staging some grotesque moral performance art about fraternal guilt and complicity.
Then they have sex against a tree, and Gweirydd learns about that glass shard in the most painful way imaginable.
It’s not exactly subtle. But subtlety seems unnecessary when your subjects are “rapist son of morally bankrupt land thieves” and “ancient goddess using a corpse like a weaponized dress.”
The Reveal: This Is Not Your Cadi
Mair, who has been the only person with any sense all night, eventually gets a phone call: the car that drove into the nearby lake? It was Cadi’s.
Which means the girl Glenda hired drowned hours ago.
The thing in the house isn’t Cadi. It’s the goddess of the Rise, wearing Cadi’s body. Suddenly, everything makes horrible sense.
Mair flees. Glenda doesn’t. And then the film drops the polite mask and goes fully feral.
The Feast: Eat the Rich (Literally)
The last stretch is a bloody, surreal, deeply satisfying reckoning:
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Gwyn is killed by a skewer driven into his ear—neatly echoing the bleeding oil worker at the start and all the times he refused to really listen.
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Gweirydd staggers back, carrying his dead brother like a grotesque offering, before bleeding out.
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Glenda, catatonic and possibly partially possessed, butchers her own son’s body and serves his maggot-ridden leg to Euros, who eats like an animal at the trough.
When she sticks a shotgun in Euros’ mouth and asks, “After you’ve taken everything, what will be left?” it’s the closest the film gets to underlining its themes with a neon marker. He’s consumed everything: land, lives, profits, flesh. She answers her own question with a pull of the trigger. Then she calmly slits her own throat.
The goddess doesn’t even need to kill everyone. The rot inside them does most of the work.
Finally, she returns to the Rise and burns all the bodies. A cleansing. A reset. Nature’s version of “we’re done here.”
Performances: Ice-Cold Rage and Quiet Revenge
Annes Elwy as Cadi/goddess is unnerving in the best way. She barely speaks, but every movement feels loaded—curiosity, contempt, sorrow, rage, all simmering under that stillness.
Nia Roberts’ Glenda is a brilliant study in denial. She’s built her whole life on this land and stuffed down every doubt. Watching those doubts explode back up through her is deeply satisfying and more than a little tragic.
Julian Lewis Jones gives Gwyn exactly the mix of bluster and brittle insecurity you’d expect from a man who thinks everything is his but knows, deep down, it isn’t.
Everyone feels like a piece of a broken system, and Cadi is the force that finally snaps it.
Final Course: Bitter, Beautiful, and Brutal
The Feast is not a jumpy date-night horror flick. It’s a tightly controlled, slow, poetic exercise in “What if the land finally said no?”
It’s:
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Beautifully shot
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Cleverly vicious
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Unapologetically gross when it wants to be
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And quietly, righteously furious about greed and violation
It ends not with a sequel tease, but with fire and silence. The kind of silence that says, “Think before you dig.”
If you like your horror with folklore, moral payback, and rich people making catastrophically bad choices while something ancient watches… pull up a chair.
Just, uh, maybe skip the meat course.
