Watched The Birthday
I watched the 2004 Corey Feldman movie The Birthday recently and was extremely impressed by how unpleasant and hideous it was!!
This is unpleasant [intentional] and hideous [laudatory]. It's clearly an attempt to capture something "Lynchian," and it mostly succeeds.
Feldman plays a socially submissive and interpersonally awkward man with a low-paying job. He has been dating a very rich young woman who is extremely cruel to him, withholding even the simplest gestures of gratitude and intimacy. He loves her desperately and wants to make grand, expensive gestures of appreciation to her, even as she treats him like shit in front of her wealthy family. They spend the evening trapped together at her father's birthday party - which is also the "birthday" of the hotel where they're holding the party.
Every scene is lit like shit; everyone is covered in dark, strangling shadows, and the environment is full of uneasy greens. Everyone treats Feldman's character like a grotesque interloper. Gradually, it becomes clear that something else is going on at the hotel... whether that "something else" works for you probably makes the difference between whether you love the movie or are totally unimpressed by it.
I thought the first half was a bit too long, but the absurd second half did work for me, and I did appreciate its messy, wild-eyed evolution into something deeply bizarre. I think Feldman starts off playing a caricature, intentionally, and only really manages to express his character's genuine qualities by the end of the story, deep into its strangest parts. I was very glad I held on long enough to see it.
I do suspect that this is the kind of movie that begins so slowly and unpleasantly (deliberately so, but still) that people might tap out before getting to the weird stuff. I'm glad I did, because it did resonate with me! This movie and Shiva Baby are perhaps now my top two "what it feels like to be at a family function that you hate" movies. And that's a huge accomplishment!!