Crew
Director – Miles Doleac, Screenplay – Miles Doleac & Michael Donovan Horn, Producers – James V. Burlian, Miles Doleac, Wesley C. O’Mary & Lindsay Anne Williams, Photography – Michael Williams, Music – Clifton Hyde, Visual Effects Supervisor – Wesley C. O’Mary, Makeup Effects/Production Design – Julie Toche. Production Company – Historia Films/Artist Vodka Films.
Cast
Alli Hart (Hayley Duncan), Mike Mayhall (Jeffrey Duncan), Bill Sage (Carmine Braun), Miles Doleac (Vincent), Lindsay Anne Williams (Sadie Nichols), Sawandi Wilson (Sebastian Todd), Kamille McCuin (Agatha Archer), Ritchie Montgomery (Deputy Brooks), Hollis Elzey (Dr Weems)
Plot
Playwright Jeffrey Duncan and his wife Hayley have been invited to an exclusive dinner party held by Carmine Braun. Jeffrey is excited to attend because it means making connections among the elites. He cautions Hayley to keep her nervousness and mental health issues under control. However, as soon as they arrive and sit down to dine, the other guests seem to be playing games and toying with them. Jeffrey’s throat is then abruptly slit and Hayley learns that Carmine plans to cook his body as the main course.
Miles Doleac is best known as an actor. He has appeared in various supporting roles in films like Shark Lake (2015), Don’t Kill It (2016), Mississippi River Sharks (2017), and tv shows such as American Horror Story (2011- ), Containment (2016), The Purge (2018-9) and Lovecraft Country (2020), among others. At the same time, Doleac also works as a director/writer. He has made the non-genre The Historian (2014) and The Hollow (2016) and then ventured into horror with Demons (2017) and stayed there with Hallowed Ground (2019), The Dinner Party, Demigod (2021) and the non-genre musical Open (2023), while he has also produced Bone Face (2025). He has also made acting appearances in all of his directorial outings, which also co-star and are co-produced by Doleac’s wife Lindsay Anne Williams. She can be seen here in the role of the red-haired witch.
With The Dinner Party, Miles Doleac creates a posh dinner party that is juxtaposed with a brutal savagery beneath. The guests are a wealthy elite, bitchy and snobbish in their tastes and affectations, which contrast with corruption, cannibalism, some kind of occult ritual and even necrophilia going on not far beneath the proceedings. This is a contrast that has played out in similar films such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Late Night Double Feature (2016) and The Feast (2021), while there was also The Last Supper (1995) that had liberal students invite a group of horrible conservatives to dinner to kill them.
The Dinner Party is annoying in a lot of ways. Right from the very moment that young couple Mike Mayhall and Alli Hart arrive at the house, things are off – everyone they meet is taunting and toying with them, trying to weird them out by saying something outrageous, play some sort of joke or being dismissive of their interests. Husband Mayhall seems so controlling of the uncertain and weak-willed Alli Hart, who we are told has a mental health history, that none of what is going on comes with any kind of subtlety – the directions where everything is going to go seem obvious. Certainly, the house is beautifully lit and there are cuts away to artistically laid-out tableaux of the meals.
The entire first half of The Dinner Party is all people figuratively jumping out to prank others or tossing off catty, pseudo-sophisticated putdowns. There is no nuance to any of it, it is all a joke repeated and sustained on a single note. One of the unintentional amusements is when the group are standing around talking about a rare artwork and then seeing what they are talking about is a garden variety mass reproduction of a Jackson Pollock. Not to mention Miles Doleac casts himself as one of the sophisticates while outfitted with a fake London East End accent that comes across as a bad attempt to mimic Ray Winstone.
And we have seen enough of these types of films to know that none of this ends well. The latter quarter of the film turns into a female avenger film and gets quite bloody with Alli Hart tearing people’s throats out with her teeth and the like. Perhaps the weirdest aspect of The Dinner Party is when it takes a left field tangent right at the end and [PLOT SPOILERS] reveals Lindsay Anne Williams as some kind of deity, although not The Devil but possibly his daughter or someone else from Biblical lineage.
Trailer here