‘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 traditional 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 forged. It’s summer season 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 reveals 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 Lady With The Needle) for a lavish twenty fifth party.

Fashionable 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 Celebration may effectively safe widespread distribution after its premiere in Locarno, its enchantment additional bolstered by multinational stars who ought to assist it win audiences of their relative homelands.

Certainly, the celebration arrivals permit Jimenez to nimbly provide a tour of his ensemble forged, which incorporates Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders) as English author Ian Forster, who is raring for Marcos to log out on a biography he has written. There may be additionally Basic Franco acolyte Marquis (Spanish veteran Francesc Garrido) and the Marquis’ sweet-natured son and Sofia’s childhood good friend (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 needs to strike a divorce deal, plus Marcos’s longtime good friend 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 lower by with disappointment and sparkles of vulnerability when least anticipated, uncertainty betrayed not by dialogue however a twitch of the cheek. His ability permits a drop of sympathy to stay with the satan, his contradictions additionally emphasised by a solo dance scene during which the world initially appears to fall away from him as he glows towards the darkish, earlier than the celebration 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 ’protected line’. Jimenez builds the intrigue with this and the emergence of different tantalising particulars. The narrative spins out from the stress between Marcos’s need to clip his daughter’s wings, and her opposing dedication to do what she needs. As a substitute 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 — no less than in idea — however there’s a sense that everybody there needs 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 night time 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 delicate 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 a success for Gloria Gaynor and the reappearance of a hoop on a finger, however with this a lot fashion it’s unlikely anybody will get hung up on petty particulars. Beneath the trendy storytelling lies the stable bedrock of historical tragedy.