NZIFF Film Review: "Family Dinner" (2022).

From executive producer Ant Timpson comes Family Dinner. This Austrian horror film written and directed by Peter Hengl. Overweight and insecure, Simi spends Easter weekend with her famous nutritionist aunt. The hope is that it’ll help her get on a healthier track, but as the aunt’s family’s icy dynamics and an increasingly malevolent atmosphere leave Simi feeling uneasy, weight isn’t the only thing she’s about to lose.

The film stars Pia Hierzegger, Michael Pink, Nina Katlein, and Alexander Sladek. The first half is sadistically intense, Hierzegger makes a wonderfully creepy psychopath, and Hengl and cinematographer Gabriel Krajanek burnish the film to a high polish that's rare for the genre. The emotions of Katlein are clear and complex -- her conflict dominate our experience of the narrative as powerfully as all the devices telling us to look elsewhere for the movie's themes.

The film uses the narrative of a typical horror film set within the confines of a home and makes fun of the set expectations and clichés in the audience's mind. Yet we, as the audience, are invited to participate in the amoral act, and soon we have to question our own feelings, lest they stray too close to the vicious antagonists we are rooting against. The film is a viciously effective polemic against the placid acceptance of film violence, a perverse experiment in audience manipulation that lures us into watching what should be unwatchable and then draws our attention to our unexamined desires. Ultimately, the film confronts why we consume horror, questioning the viewer subtly every so often between the brutality: why are you still watching? As Haneke's films are famously pessimistic, blackhearted affairs that peel back the thin veneer of politesse hiding human monstrosity. So is this one. It isn't the best film of the year, but it is his most viscerally frightening. So much of it is elevated to engrossing observation because it is a movie that takes these ideas seriously, not as tools meant to turn a stomach. What Hengl has actually done is to satirize the complex relationship between the story and the audience. On that level it's a triumph. Alternately infuriating and harrowing, the film is a potent piece of shock cinema that thrives on making the audience uncomfortable. A firestarter for post-screening arguments, alight with ghastly images and actions, and essayed by a spot-on cast and storyline that flows seamlessly from one nightmarish incident to the next. This beautifully acted and paced German variant of The Wicker Man and Get Out is tricked out with a number of Brechtian devices to catch audiences in a voyeuristic trance. I respect the film, and think it a valuable and important work of art, but I wouldn't sit through the thing again for a sum with fewer than three figures. It's a film you might argue with, but its sparing use of on-screen violence, some extraordinarily protracted scenes and sensitive handling of thorny subject matter make it also a film you ought to see.

Simon says Family Dinner receives:

Also, see my NZIFF review for Corsage.