'The Dinner Party' — MiamisFF Review
A young woman finds herself trapped in a crossfire of awkwardness during a nightmarish dinner party with her boyfriend's dysfunctional family.

Campus couple Tae-ho and Eun-seo join the same graudate school to sit in lectures for the most powerful person in Korean journalism, Lee Hee-hyun. On the first day of school, Lee Hee-hyun takes a liking to pretty and smart Eun-seo and uses his authority to try and seduce her, but fails. Hye-jin realizes what the professor is trying to do and spends a night with him, getting herself to the syposium. Eun-seo questions the result and asks Lee Hee-hyun for an explanation. He asks her for physical pleasure and Eun-seo is just confused...
A young woman finds herself trapped in a crossfire of awkwardness during a nightmarish dinner party with her boyfriend's dysfunctional family.
Magnolia focuses on how one’s childhood and trauma relate to their confidence and self.
These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.
“And I think to myself….what a wonderful world”. Louis Armstrong sang about this notion via his classic 1967 song, an ode to witnessing elements of our life that should be but some reminders of exactly what that concluding line of each verse indicates. Now we see our contemporary realities and, just being honest, it makes a sentiment like this seem SO overtly far away….perhaps even impossible….to accept or believe could be. It sounds harsh, but again, so much of what is occurring speaks not to beauty, but bedlam.
Cassie, a musician, and Luke, a man serving in the Marines, form a false relationship and keep it a secret.