The Dinner (2017)

Moverman balances the potential for staginess with his flowing cinematic bravura; he keeps surprising you, and he gives the drama a dash of poison elegance.

This is a film that glories in juxtaposition, as exchanges of bestial ferocity hiss back and forth in an excruciatingly elegant destination restaurant, and as poisonously feral barbs are traded across a table laden with elaborately effete hors d’oeuvres.

At once a darkly comic social satire, a pitch-black moral thriller and an earnest plea to recognize mental illness, The Dinner is a seven-layer dip overflowing with compelling individual ingredients that, when mixed together, make the finished dish awfully difficult to digest.

Moverman’s discordant structure constantly veers from clumsy moments to fascinating exchanges. As an experiment, it never finds a complete shape, and ends on a frustratingly abrupt note.

A high-carat cast...tears into the juicy material with relish for the most part, but by trying to keep the prolonged sit-down affair from becoming excessively stagey, Moverman adds too many distracting flashbacks to maintain the original’s hard-hitting and well-aimed gut punch.