10 great films about dinner parties

For as long as there have been dinner parties, astute observers have been attuned to that most cinematic of dinner party ingredients: drama. Seat a group of people – whether close-knit or barely acquainted – around a table and soon enough, the alcohol will lower inhibitions, polite conversation will turn barbed, and regrets will mount as the night winds down. The performative social niceties and set rituals associated with such gatherings can often be constrictive, which is what makes it so thrilling to see them transgressed.

Dinner party films come in different flavours, sometimes involving guests assembled for specific (and often nefarious) reasons, such as the solving of a murder, or the committing of one. Consider House on Haunted Hill (1958) or comedic variations such as Murder by Death (1976) or Clue (1985). The arrival of an unexpected guest, as in An Ideal Host (2020), is always a reliable chaos-inducing element. Just as often, however, it’s the invited visitors that spell trouble. It’s also no surprise that films within this subgenre sometimes emphasise the careful planning such an event necessitates, only to then wring suspense from ensuing circumstances beyond the host’s control.

In The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s English-language remake of Spanish film The People Upstairs (2020), an unhappily married couple invite their sexually freewheeling neighbours over for dinner, setting the table for a melancholic examination of stagnancy in long-term relationships. To mark its release, we sit down with 10 earlier films in which dinner brings drama.

Director: George Cukor

A New York socialite (Billie Burke) throws herself into organising a glitzy dinner party, unaware her husband (Lionel Barrymore) is facing impending financial ruin; she grows increasingly agitated over the curation of an ideal guest list, oblivious to her invitees’ illicit entanglements. This juxtaposition of presented image and glum reality is a recurring theme in Dinner at Eight, based on the 1932 play of the same name, and reflective of a country in the crushing grip of the Great Depression. Against this background of financial collapse, the film depicts businesses and bodies under immense stress.

In assembling characters who represent the contrast between the old money and nouveau riche, the has-beens and the striving social climbers, director George Cukor punctures the glossy bubble of high society altogether, positioning it as a crude and crooked class, wracked by debt and infidelity. If the better part of the film’s runtime is spent setting up the party, it only amplifies the perverse enjoyment of watching it all come crashing down as the hour draws nearer.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Whether in Dial M for Murder (1954), in which an apartment provides the perfect setup for a premeditated murder, or in Psycho (1960), in which a deceased inhabitant still hasn’t relinquished her hold over her son, Alfred Hitchcock’s films envisioned the home not as a safe haven, but as a site of psychological turmoil and physical violation. In Rope, two intellectuals strangle their former prep school classmate to death at their flat, then conceal his body in the very room his family and friends are celebrating in.

Unfolding in real-time, the film’s seamless one-take editing and roaming camera movements are in contrast to the turbulent emotional stirrings of the nervy Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger). As his more domineering partner Brandon Shaw (John Dall) flirts with the prospect of being caught, he’s terrified by it. With one guest’s knack for making penetrating remarks, two former lovers angered at being pulled into each other’s orbit and the unknowing partygoers awaiting the missing guest with growing impatience, the air grows suffocating. Food remains untouched. Alcohol becomes a guilty conscience’s crutch. Soirées have rarely seemed as funereal.

Director: Luis Buñuel

A decade after Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) followed a group of aristocrats inexplicably unable to leave a dinner party, the filmmaker reversed this approach for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, depicting an upper-class group of friends who, beset by interruptions and miscommunications, just can’t seem to begin one. Dinnertimes unfold as a series of thwarted plans, in which the guests either arrive too soon for any food to have been prepared, or are compelled to leave before it’s been served. Restaurants, hit by staff crises and food shortages, can’t satiate them either. Is the group’s never-ending quest for food a metaphor for the exploitative class’ bottomless feeding off those less privileged than them?

Buñuel’s surreal, absurdist film incisively lays bare the hypocrisies of this set: the bourgeoisie claim to possess a refinement the ‘masses’ don’t but eventually succumbs to their basest desires. Most galling are their casual cruelties against the working class – an elderly gardener is mistreated by his former employers for years, then impulsively killed by their son.

Director: Govind Nihalani

“Log kya kahenge?” (“What will people say?”) is a recurring refrain in Party, a Hindi-language phrase weaponised to justify contorting oneself to fit punishing societal expectations. At a get-together hosted by a wealthy middle-aged widow (Vijaya Mehta) to celebrate her playwright partner (Manohar Singh), members of the elite intellectual class – poets, playwrights, theatre actors – are gradually revealed to have made many such compromises, eroding their self-confidence and self-perception by tying it to external validation. These people are trapped by loveless marriages and inert careers, and even little acts of defiance can’t translate into more meaningful life changes.

Filmmaker Govind Nihalani emerged from the Parallel Cinema movement of the 1960s, which offered an alternative to commercial Hindi films. Based on Mahesh Elkunchwar’s play of the same name, his film Party exposes the emptiness of a group whose banal, blinkered and self-centred conversations remain oblivious to art as a political force, and to the artist’s position as a dissenting voice against state violence. It’s no surprise that the one guest who fiercely embodies this role never arrives.

Director: Gabriel Axel

The dinner party in Babette’s Feast has to be one of the most dispiriting ever put to film: the most sumptuous of courses, the best of wines, but guests who eat in determined silence, fearful that any outward enjoyment of such decadence might be deemed sinful. In this 19th-century-set drama, the austere inhabitants of a remote Danish hamlet are startled at the arrival of exotic ingredients – a deviation from their usual bland fare – intended by French cook Babette Hersant (Stéphane Audran) to comprise a dinner celebrating the local pastor’s 100th birth anniversary.

Gradually, however, over caviar-topped pancakes and quail-stuffed puff pastry, the community’s stoicism breaks down, fraying relationships are mended and an appreciation emerges for not just the fine food, but for Babette’s supremely self-sacrificial nature. For the group, this is the introduction of a new cuisine; for the chef, this is a return to her roots. In this film, piety and pleasure co-exist, and the transformative power of a shared meal reinvigorates both the maker and receiver.

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

Several scenes in this Danish drama unfold as though from the point of view of a spectral presence, fitting for a story in which a traumatised son finally unburdens himself of something that’s haunted him since childhood. The 60th birthday party of the family patriarch might be a luxury, black-tie affair, held at his country estate, replete with a catered dinner and well-heeled guests, but it’s against this backdrop that a sordid history of abuse resurfaces.

Handheld camera and grainy footage give Festen the aesthetic of a home video – tying into its themes of an unearthed past – but where such recordings usually evoke warm, fuzzy feelings, these recalled memories are horrific. For all the film’s atmosphere of voyeurism, and every furious argument and intimate moment the audience is privy to, the real shock lies in what the family has adamantly chosen to turn a blind eye to. Their manicured facade is ruptured as they devolve into fistfights and blatant racism. With this melancholic film, Thomas Vinterberg depicts how inherited trauma persists and cycles of violence are repeated over generations. The party might conclude, but familial damage isn’t resolved as neatly.

Directors: Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott

In the 50s-set comedy-drama Big Night, cooking is a shared language between two brothers who spar over almost everything else. Immigrants Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci) run a dwindling Italian restaurant on the Jersey Shore over which looms the threat of foreclosure. In a seemingly generous offer, competitor Pascal (Ian Holm) offers to have his popular jazz singer friend dine there so that the publicity can revitalize their business.

This make-or-break, no-expense-spared six-course dinner party is chronicled through rapturous first bites — Primo’s sublime skill is never in doubt — giddy party games and lively dancing. “It’s the Last Supper!,” declares Pascal joyously, an understanding of the event’s monumental significance, but also a sobering reminder of its stakes, and a tragic foreshadowing of what’s to ensue. Rippling beneath the film’s breeziness is an undercurrent of sadness via its examination of the American Dream, which is always just out of grasp for these brothers. How long will their striving remain unrewarded? By Big Night’s bittersweet end, it’s as much about who shows up as who sticks around long after the party’s over.

Director: James Ward Byrkit

Even before the topic of a passing comet is introduced and the extent of its influence on erratic behaviour is debated, Coherence’s central dinner party is one primed to induce discomfort in its guests, made up of exes, affair partners, veiled hostilities and bubbling enmities. As phone screens inexplicably crack and connectivity vanishes, the lack of distractions only pushes them to fixate on their issues even more.

An early mention of an understudy foreshadows the sci-fi drama’s theme of doubles and replacements: as tensions rise, the eight characters soon figure out that the comet has temporarily splintered their reality into several parallel, co-existing universes. Those who step out for a while gradually realise the house they’ve returned to is not the one they left. For all its sci-fi machinations, this is a well-crafted, largely single-location film that builds to a question of wrenching poignancy – what wouldn’t you give to belong to a universe in which you could finally be happy?

Director: Trey Edward Shults

Krisha taps into that sinking feeling of being on the fringes of every group at a dinner party – that one guest the others awkwardly tiptoe around, the tight-knit camaraderie you don’t share, the simmering resentment you’re acutely aware is directed towards you. Shot with a cast comprising largely his own relatives, including his aunt in the eponymous role, Trey Edward Shults’ debut feature is a look at the vicious cycle of addiction and how public attempts to make amends are often undercut by private acts of self destruction.

As the long-estranged (and declared sober) Krisha reunites with her family over Thanksgiving, the film emphasises her isolation through the sounds of laughter outside her room, the conversations she’s not part of but eavesdrops on, and an absent partner who can’t provide comfort. Long takes provide no respite from the discomfort; regrets are everywhere Krisha looks, but the emptiness is within.

Director: Paolo Genovese

The game is simple: each of the seven guests gathered for dinner must share every text, email and call they get with the rest of the group. What’s far more complex is the web of unearthed illicit entanglements. Director Paolo Genovese establishes a dynamic of good-natured ribbing between friends who’ve known each other for years but are acutely aware of each other’s flaws. At first, they aren’t upset by the revelations – most boil down to infidelity – but that they weren’t confided in to begin with. Their camaraderie even extends to phones being furtively swapped so as to make incriminating material appear innocuous. And even as years of harboured resentments are forced out into the open, the sparring partners arrive at a truce, no matter how tenuous.

As the night goes on, however, the mood deflates, public humiliations erupt, and an uncomfortable silence seems to stretch on for far too long. Wanting to know, the film points out, isn’t the same as being able to accept. Even the sturdiest-seeming relationships rest atop a rotting foundation. The facade must be maintained, no matter the cost.