‘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 classic Agatha Christie in Miguel Angel Jimenez’s stylish tale of hedonism and heartbreak, with its sun-kissed setting on a Mediterranean island, dangerous power play and high-end international cast. It is summer 1975 and, while murder may not be on the agenda, Willem Dafoe’s Onassis-style magnate Marcos Timoleon has evidently made a killing in business — even as an economical prologue shows he has also suffered personal loss. Marcos owns the unnamed Mediterranean island on which elaborate preparations are afoot to welcome back his only daughter Sophia (Vic Carmen Sonne, the Danish star of The Girl With The Needle) for a lavish 25th birthday party.

Stylish tale of hedonism and heartbreak

Adapting Panos Karnezis’s novel of the same name, Jimenez and co-writers Giorgos Karnavas and Nicos Panagiotopoulos shear off most of Marcos’s backstory in favour of immersing viewers in the machiavellian scheming of the present. A slick and taut affair, glinting with hints of black comedy, The Birthday Party could well secure widespread distribution after its premiere in Locarno, its appeal further bolstered by multinational stars who should help it win audiences in their relative homelands.

Indeed, the party arrivals allow Jimenez to nimbly offer a tour of his ensemble cast, which includes Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders) as English writer Ian Forster, who is eager for Marcos to sign off on a biography he has written. There is also General Franco acolyte Marquis (Spanish veteran Francesc Garrido) and the Marquis’ sweet-natured son and Sofia’s childhood friend (Carlos Cuevas). Also present is Sofia’s stepmother and Marcos’s soon-to-be-ex wife Olivia (Emma Suarez, reteaming with Jimenez after starring in his debut Window To The Sea), who wants to strike a divorce deal, plus Marcos’s longtime friend and doctor Patrikios (Greek Dogtooth star Christos Stergioglou).

They all drift in and out of the orbit of Dafoe’s intense central performance; searing at one moment but cut through with sadness and flickers of vulnerability when least expected, uncertainty betrayed not by dialogue but a twitch of the cheek. His skill allows a drop of sympathy to remain with the devil, his contradictions also emphasised by a solo dance scene in which the world initially seems to fall away from him as he glows against the dark, before the party comes back into focus through the click and flash of a forbidden camera.

Fate once dealt Marcos a cruel blow and he has left little to chance since, as evidenced by the reel-to-reel tape recorder seen playing conversations that Sofia mistakenly believes have been held on a ’safe line’. Jimenez builds the intrigue with this and the emergence of other tantalising details. The narrative spins out from the tension between Marcos’s desire to clip his daughter’s wings, and her opposing determination to do what she wants. Instead of bodies piling up, it is veiled threats and schemes as Marcos attempts to protect his legacy at any cost over the course of two days.

Cameras may not be allowed on the island — at least in theory — but there is a sense that everyone there wants to be seen, and Gris Jordana’s camera takes its lead from one or other of them, adopting their viewpoint. Shooting in Corfu and Athens, her lensing drinks in the sparkling sunlight of the day and the sultry heat of the night as Bachanalia beckons and sea water or sweat glistens on skin. Around his central tale of secrets and lies, Jimenez also crafts a subtle satire of wealthy excess, emphasised by a prawn glistening unattractively here, a birthday cake message misspelled there.

There are one or two niggles, not least a party crooner striking up ’I Will Survive’ a full three years before it was a hit for Gloria Gaynor and the reappearance of a ring on a finger, but with this much style it is unlikely anyone will get hung up on petty details. Underneath the modern storytelling lies the solid bedrock of ancient tragedy.