When rich people get together for a dinner party in an isolated country house, there’s more on the menu than just overpriced steak and designer drugs. Celebrating the birthday of resentful filmmaker Adam (Iwan Rheon), four friends passive-aggressively (and then aggressive-aggressively) bicker and fight until a gang of mask-wearing psychopaths rock up at the door, wielding zip-ties and shotguns.
A version of Funny Games for the rich-eating Ready or Not and Knives Out generation, this suspenseful home invasion movie purposefully makes its subjects (an insufferable Tom Cullen being the other one) hard to root for. Caught in the middle, Eva (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Chloe (Inès Spiridonov) are a little more sympathetic, but it’s hard to feel too badly for any of them, fighting in (and over) their fancy new country house. After almost an hour of childish power-struggles and infighting, it’s almost a relief when the masked men come knocking. Whatever the film’s villains may lack in personality, it’s easy to see why they might feel so aggrieved.
Director Charles Dorfman sticks close to the Home Invasion slash Dinner Party Gone Wrong horror film template, livening things up with a cheeky streak of black humour and fun performances from the talented cast. While the ultimate destination is predictable (you should be able to tell where all this is headed after the first ten minutes) there are enough shocks and surprises along the way to make this an enjoyable experience. More enjoyable than a dinner party with a bunch of sniping, sulking rich people, anyway.
