Dinner with Friends brings viewers inside a fractured group of eight longtime friends who intermittently come together for dinner parties to share in the joys and pains of being adults today.
With so many major distractions like kids and careers, adult friendships are hard to maintain, reducing in-person quality time to a minimum. That is the basis of Dinner With Friends, the feature debut of Sasha Leigh Henry (Sinking Ship, TIFF ’20; Bria Mack Gets a Life, TIFF ’23).
Channelling films like The Big Chill, Husbands and Wives, and Past Lives for inspiration, Dinner With Friends follows eight longtime friends as they meet up for dinner parties — sometimes after months have passed — that often end in surprise announcements and hurt feelings.
Henry, alongside frequent collaborator Tania Thompson, takes topics that are realistic and mundane, like caring for aging parents or sitting in city traffic, and uses those as launching points for major drama and full character developments.
Fittingly, we only ever see the group together, with the exception of the first scenes introducing long-married couple Joy (Tattiawna Jones) and Malachi (Alex Spencer) as they debate whether to put in the effort to reunite the friend group. Once together, long-held tensions and inside jokes lend authenticity, suggesting these friends have spent their twenties together.
Dinner With Friends offers a look inside this set of millennials, with full access to their group chat and a seat at their tables, begrudgingly hosted by anyone except for the Type A Joy.
KELLY BOUTSALIS
Screenings
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Scotiabank 10