Review
Review: a four-hour film about a single dinner party, and every minute earns it
Eleven guests, one table, no cutaways. The year’s most patient film is also its most gripping.
Film critic
6 min read
The film unfolds almost entirely around a single dinner table.
The first course arrives at minute twelve. The last guest leaves at minute two hundred and thirty-one. In between, nobody leaves the room, and neither, remarkably, did anyone in the audience at its Venice premiere.
It is a film about a family deciding whether to sell a house. It is also about everything else.
How it works
The director shot the film in real time over four consecutive evenings, with the camera moving slowly around the table. Conversations overlap. Some are hard to hear. You lean in, the way you would at a real dinner.
The film trusts its audience to pay attention, and rewards them for it.
Where it falters
The third hour sags, and one subplot about a missing inheritance feels borrowed from a different, lesser film. But the final twenty minutes, in which almost nothing is said, are among the most affecting I have seen this year.
Verdict: four stars. Book a late dinner afterwards.
Trailer.
Topics
Kenji Moreau
Film critic
Kenji has reviewed more than two thousand films and still sits in the front row.
