'The Birthday Party' Review
- Josh Davis
- 6 hours ago
- 3 min read
Release Date: 08/14/26 [VOD]
Genre: Drama.
MPAA: Not Rated.
Distributor: Quiver Distribution.
The Verdict: A Mistake
Writer-director Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s latest film, The Birthday Party, is ostensibly about a wealthy businessman throwing a lavish birthday party for his daughter on a private Greek island. There’s a crowd, a band, and lots and lots of money, power, and intrigue.
The host is Markos Timoleon (Willem Dafoe), a man so wealthy that rules haven’t mattered for a very long time. There's a long shadow cast by the death of his son several years ago, and this is the first time he’s let a crowd of people come back.
That doesn’t exactly excuse Markos’ bad behavior. Within the film’s first hour, we see him being handsy with the help, unnecessarily nude, wildly boastful, and generally unsettling to be around. He’s vain, arrogant, manipulative, and convinced that the world exists largely for his amusement.
In short, he’s just a giant creep.
His daughter, Sofia (Vic Carmen Sonne), is pregnant. The father, journalist Ian Forster (Joe Cole), is writing Markos’ life story.
There’s a joke about The Godfather being based on Markos. He insists a different 1970s film – one involving a very large shark – is really about him instead. That exchange captures much of the movie’s aesthetic. Everything here feels steeped in a hazy 1970s pastiche, from the pacing to the atmosphere to the styling.
The acting, cinematography, and score are impressively sumptuous and engrossing. Dafoe, in particular, leans fully into Markos’ vanity, arrogance, and slow unraveling, playing the supposedly Greek businessman with his natural accent and enough confidence that you almost stop noticing.
Sonne portrays Sofia as a sort of jaded victim of all the excess and vapidity that surround her. There’s a cool numbness to her performance that feels intentional, but it makes it hard to find an entry point for her character – or virtually anyone else in the film.
The problem is, the story is just so damned self-serious. In fact, watching The Birthday Party often feels like watching a movie made before irony was invented.
Perhaps it’s that we live in an era when so much art is filtered through irony or dark comedy, from Rian Johnson to Yorgos Lanthimos. Whatever the reason, the film’s commitment to playing everything completely straight becomes frustrating.
In a nutshell, this movie doesn’t know how to have fun. It isn’t particularly twisty. It isn’t violent, even though it feels like it is building to violence. It isn’t horrifying, except in a vaguely 1970s psychosexual kind of way.
Markos and Sofia share a fractious relationship that is also strangely, uncomfortably sexually charged. In fact, the entire movie is strangely, uncomfortably horny. At one point, nearly everyone takes off their clothes and jumps into a swimming pool.
Jiménez co-wrote the screenplay with Nikos Panayotopoulos and Giorgos Karnavas, adapting the novel by Panos Karnezis. The result often feels less like a mystery and more like a mood piece searching for a purpose.
At times, it feels like the movie was made in the same fog of booze, drugs, and excess that it depicts. The problem is that nobody remembered the second half of the old writing advice: write drunk, edit sober.
On the morning after Sofia’s birthday party, the island is filled with hungover guests and the sound of buzzing flies. There’s a search party. There’s a thematically gross scene involving a doctor. There’s one final beat between Sofia and Markos. Then the film closes with Dafoe singing a spooky, orchestral, slightly desiccated version of The Animals’ classic “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” over the credits. The song fades. Only the sound of the ocean remains.
Sometimes a movie goes over your head because its ideas are so ambitious and sweeping that they transcend easy explanation. Other times a movie goes over your head because there’s a gap between ambition and execution.
This feels like the latter.
Like so many of the people wandering this beautiful island, The Birthday Party is a big, gorgeous mess.
