Family Dinner
Her aunt by marriage Claudia Schwarz a successful author and dietician, teenage Simone hopes that spending a week with her in the run up to Easter will be a step towards losing the weight she has struggled with, the first time she has seen Claudia since her divorce but neither she nor her cousin Filipp with whom she has to share a room apparently inclined to make her feel welcome.
Contrarily, Claudia’s new boyfriend Stefan is overly familiar with Simi despite them never having met, but there are strict rules in the household, Claudia demanding that if Simi is to lose weight she must abstain from all food, only allowed to drink water, while Filipp is doted on, his rudeness ignored, his food cut up for him, and Claudia reticent to include Simi in the private family dinner they have planned for Easter Sunday.
An uncomfortable oddity of table manners, family and blood written and directed by Peter Hengl, Family Dinner stars Nina Katlein and Pia Hierzegger as the impressionable and overweight Simone and the imperious Claudia with Michael Pink as Stefan, obsessed with yoga but cheating on his own enforced diet, and Alexander Sladek as Filipp, treated as though he were feeble in mind and body by his mother but displaying a very different personality to his cousin.
Confessing his hatred of his controlling mother, Simi is a poor confidante, feeling out of place and trying to belong by appeasing all sides even if means betrayal of secrets, Filipp taking revenge on her by placing gifts in her bed, playing with his penknife through the night, taunting her and calling her names, a far from happy family where the rot starts at the head rather than the root.
A claustrophobic drama with only the four characters in their remote farmhouse beyond the fields where a pile of logs and branches are piled high for the Easter bonfire, Simi’s uncertainty about her stay become concerns about her safety as her phone vanishes and a look at Claudia’s new manuscript show a leap from nutrition to a more radical approach to health and wellbeing.
The aspects of folk horror slowly introduced in Claudia’s runes, totems and rituals before finally laid bare in the finale, Family Dinner is a slim feast better in the anticipation than the execution, dragging and stilted and never quite sure what it wants to be, the threat manifested in black eyes and a literal bucket of blood making a sudden leap not quite justified even as it expresses that there is no torture quite like unwanted family time.
Family Dinner is streaming on the Arrow platform now
