Let's go. What did the selectors of the last IFF in Toronto see in a low-budget horror from Britain? Stylish image? Partly. Color drama is not banal: a house, a fortress, a shelter is drowned in coal-black, and the outside world is blinded by cruel white: traumatic ice on the rink, the ruthless light of hospital lamps, insidious psychoactive powder. The boundary space between black and white fills with greenery. But not the vital May grass, but the mysterious dark malachite hue of an ominously dangerous dense forest. The solution is subtle, but not revolutionary.
The story of how a girl from the British outback felt like a messiah and periodically falls into a stupor, gazing her eyes into a dark sky with a blood-red moon, is visually solved through a gastronomic conflict. Betsy refuses to eat. But he's not losing weight. Oh, how elegant green peas look on black plates! How ominously wither pomegranates, bananas, strawberries in aspid-black vases! How disgusting looks nutritious mush, which already seems to anticipate the deadly effects of gastric juice. A world in which most residents are busy cooking and spend most of their lives in the kitchen is portrayed by director Ruth Paxton as doomed. In a black cave with a lot of food from the end of the world you can not hide. The idea is not very new. But popular.
Actors ensemble. Yes, British actors like no other in the world now know how to balance between the individual drawing of the role and their place in the ensemble. "Dangerous Party" is funny because the ensemble is actually female. A mother, a grandmother, two daughters - that's who keeps the whole movie. Men don't count. Dad died in terrible agony at the very beginning of the picture. Betsy and her sister Isabelle's boyfriends don't count. Their functionality is to see the messianic in the eyes of girlfriends and withdraw in a hasty manner.
Women of three generations are obsessed with different obsessions. Holly’s mother in her youth experienced something similar to what happens to Betsy, and now suffers from a guilt complex for her husband, who decided to prematurely and voluntarily stop the suffering of the body, exhausted by the disease, and for her daughter, who refused to eat, but does not lose weight. Grandma June, on the one hand, believes that her granddaughter’s frenzied states are only a way to manipulate her mother and sister. On the other hand, the experience of working in Japan brings to mind the Japanese Kaidan about a woman who stopped eating, but secretly devoured food at night with her mouth located on the back of the head.
Women are obsessed. Messiah women. Female manipulators. Women are manipulated. Women who make up the world. Women who care about the world. The women the world must save. Women who are unlikely to save him. Very trendy. But he's a bit jaded.
That's the movie. Eschatological expectations, criticism of consumption, gender confusion plus exquisite still lifes. This was enough to get the film into the competition program of the prestigious film festival in Toronto. Since the world seems to die in the finale of the picture (or is it just Holly?), in general, it is not a pity.