Main cast: Annes Elwy (Cadi), Nia Roberts (Glenda), Julian Lewis Jones (Gwyn), Steffan Cennydd (Guto), Siôn Alun Davies (Gweirydd), Rhodri Meilir (Euros), and Lisa Palfrey (Mair Bowen)
Director: Lee Haven Jones
Gwledd, or The Feast in English-speaking places, is a Welsh folk horror film, which means it inevitably boils down to how you don’t mess with nature, because nature will mess you back doubly.
This one has an anti-mining message, because I’m sure the director and the screenwriter will never use anything made from metals that they didn’t mind ethically and politely with their bare hands. Their filming equipment, vehicles, and all would be made from baked mud and hand blown glass, no doubt, because film people are never hypocrites.
Basically, the feast in question is a dinner being organized by politician Gwyn and his wife Glenda. Their sons Guto and Gweirydd are a junkie and an OCD sex fiend on a raw meat diet, respectively. Their guests include farmer Mair and mining tycoon Euros.
Quick, you have one guess as to whom will survive this dinner party. This movie certainly doesn’t try to disappoint people’s expectations: what you expect, you will certainly get here!
Anyway, trouble begins when Glenda hires a local girl, Cadi, to help with the dinner preparations. Cadi shows up all wet, doesn’t speak much, stares at people like she’s probably tad possessed, and oh, strange things happen to people around her, such as things exploding when someone scolds her or that person experiencing great pain for criticizing her even a little.
Well, local people are certainly weird, must be due to all that poverty and lack of hygiene! There’s nothing for the others to suspect when it comes to Cadi, so let’s just carry on!
This one certainly has the execution down pat: lovely scenery, well-angled and well-shot scenes, haunting music, and all.
Also, the cast members do a pretty good job here, and Annes Elway is especially good at giving menacing blank glares at everyone.
However, I’m not sure why Guto is lumped in among the lazily-done dysfunctional caricatures here as those that deserve to be effed hard by angry mother nature. Sure, he likes his substance abuse, but come on, that isn’t a death-worthy crime.
In fact, he comes off as the only sane person when compared to the rest of his degenerate and dysfunctional family, and he actually wants to just get out of town and move to London. Poor guy—this movie does him super dirty.
Justice for Guto aside, there is a very by the numbers feel to this movie, as it goes through all the folk horror tropes in a languid pace. Even the characters look like how the stereotypes usually do—Euros, especially—and the story needs these characters to be as dumb or oblivious as possible in order to work.
Hence, the take home message is more “Imbeciles deserve to die painfully and horribly!” instead of “Politicians and miners should be violently killed!”
In other words, underneath its picturesque arty-farty horror faςade, this thing isn’t very competent when it comes to telling a gripping and scary story. Come to think of it, I don’t believe that it even has anything new or interesting to say.
