‘The Birthday Party’ review: Willem Dafoe heads an international cast in entertaining tale of wealthy excess

Dir: Miguel Angel Jimenez. Greece/Spain/Netherlands/UK. 2025. 103mins.

There are echoes of basic Agatha Christie in Miguel Angel Jimenez’s trendy story of hedonism and heartbreak, with its sun-kissed setting on a Mediterranean island, harmful energy play and high-end worldwide solid. It’s summer time 1975 and, whereas homicide might not be on the agenda, Willem Dafoe’s Onassis-style magnate Marcos Timoleon has evidently made a killing in enterprise — at the same time as a cheap prologue exhibits he has additionally suffered private loss. Marcos owns the unnamed Mediterranean island on which elaborate preparations are afoot to welcome again his solely daughter Sophia (Vic Carmen Sonne, the Danish star of The Woman With The Needle) for a lavish twenty fifth party.

Trendy story of hedonism and heartbreak

Adapting Panos Karnezis’s novel of the identical identify, Jimenez and co-writers Giorgos Karnavas and Nicos Panagiotopoulos shear off most of Marcos’s backstory in favour of immersing viewers within the machiavellian scheming of the current. A slick and taut affair, glinting with hints of black comedy, The Birthday Occasion might effectively safe widespread distribution after its premiere in Locarno, its attraction additional bolstered by multinational stars who ought to assist it win audiences of their relative homelands.

Certainly, the get together arrivals permit Jimenez to nimbly provide a tour of his ensemble solid, which incorporates Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders) as English author Ian Forster, who is keen for Marcos to log off on a biography he has written. There’s additionally Basic Franco acolyte Marquis (Spanish veteran Francesc Garrido) and the Marquis’ sweet-natured son and Sofia’s childhood pal (Carlos Cuevas). Additionally current is Sofia’s stepmother and Marcos’s soon-to-be-ex spouse Olivia (Emma Suarez, reteaming with Jimenez after starring in his debut Window To The Sea), who desires to strike a divorce deal, plus Marcos’s longtime pal and physician Patrikios (Greek Dogtooth star Christos Stergioglou).

All of them drift out and in of the orbit of Dafoe’s intense central efficiency; searing at one second however reduce by with disappointment and sparkles of vulnerability when least anticipated, uncertainty betrayed not by dialogue however a twitch of the cheek. His talent permits a drop of sympathy to stay with the satan, his contradictions additionally emphasised by a solo dance scene through which the world initially appears to fall away from him as he glows towards the darkish, earlier than the get together comes again into focus by the press and flash of a forbidden digicam.

Destiny as soon as dealt Marcos a merciless blow and he has left little to probability since, as evidenced by the reel-to-reel tape recorder seen taking part in conversations that Sofia mistakenly believes have been held on a ’secure line’. Jimenez builds the intrigue with this and the emergence of different tantalising particulars. The narrative spins out from the strain between Marcos’s want to clip his daughter’s wings, and her opposing dedication to do what she desires. As an alternative of our bodies piling up, it’s veiled threats and schemes as Marcos makes an attempt to guard his legacy at any value over the course of two days.

Cameras might not be allowed on the island — a minimum of in concept — however there’s a sense that everybody there desires to be seen, and Gris Jordana’s digicam takes its lead from one or different of them, adopting their viewpoint. Taking pictures in Corfu and Athens, her lensing drinks within the glowing daylight of the day and the sultry warmth of the evening as Bachanalia beckons and sea water or sweat glistens on pores and skin. Round his central story of secrets and techniques and lies, Jimenez additionally crafts a refined satire of rich extra, emphasised by a prawn glistening unattractively right here, a birthday cake message misspelled there.

There are one or two niggles, not least a celebration crooner hanging up ’I Will Survive’ a full three years earlier than it was successful for Gloria Gaynor and the reappearance of a hoop on a finger, however with this a lot model it’s unlikely anybody will get hung up on petty particulars. Beneath the fashionable storytelling lies the stable bedrock of historical tragedy.