Director Ruth Paxton‘s psychological horror movie A Banquet has been making the festival rounds since screening at premiering at the Toronto Film Festival last year, and now it’s ready to be seen by a larger audience in the United States. IFC Midnight will be giving A Banquet a theatrical and VOD release on February 18th, and with just over a month to go until we reach that release date a trailer for the film has arrived online. You can check it out in the embed above.
Scripted by Justin Bull, A Banquet stars Sienna Guillory, who may be best known for playing Jill Valentine in three of the six Paul W.S. Anderson era Resident Evil movies (you can purchase the whole series at THIS LINK). Here Guillory takes on the role of
widowed mother Holly, who is radically tested when her teenage daughter Betsey experiences a profound enlightenment and insists that her body is no longer her own, but in service to a higher power. Bound to her newfound faith, Betsey refuses to eat but loses no weight. In an agonizing dilemma, torn between love and fear, Holly finds herself confronting the boundaries of her own beliefs and the repressed traumas of her past.
Jessica Alexander plays Betsey. Ruby Stokes and Lindsay Duncan are also in the cast.
Tea Shop Productions’ Leonora Darby, Mark Lane, and James Harris produced A Banquet with Nik Bower of Riverstone Pictures and and Laure Vaysse of REP Productions 8. REP Productions 8 also provided the funding for the project. Bull served as executive producer alongside Riverstone’s Deepak Nayar and Jeremy Baxter, as well as Creativity Capital’s Patrick Fischer and Richard Kondal.
According to Variety, Bull did research on the way American women fasted for religious purposes in the 17th and 18th centuries, digging into “how women were believed when they enacted certain things unto their bodies in the name of a religious experience”. Producer Darby said Bull’s script takes “that tradition and placed it into 21st century culture to see how that would affect people”.
The resulting film looks like it’s going to be quite intense and disturbing. A few images from A Banquet can be seen below, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly:
Follow the JOBLO MOVIE NETWORK
Follow us on YOUTUBE
Follow ARROW IN THE HEAD
Follow AITH on YOUTUBE