The Last Supper features several familiar faces, the fresh-faced Cameron Diaz, Annabeth Gish, Sleepers' Ron Eldard, Courtney B Vance and Jonathan Penner as five post-grad friends who live together in a quiet part of Iowa finishing their Masters studies. As tradition, every Sunday one of the housemates invites a guest over for dinner with the prime focus being a discussion on belief encompassing all sociological branches.
The film is a very stormy and red-washed feature, echoing the tomatoes the group are, at first, struggling to grow in their garden. A sub-plot focussing on the whereabouts of a young girl is the daily struggle of a local sheriff throughout.
After a beautiful montage of haunting oil paintings which act as strange metaphors for the story before us and quite clearly painted by Penner's Marc, we find the group partaking in their usual viewing of Norman Arbuthnot's (Ron Perlman) conservative discussion programme. Pete is late with his guest, who is an apparent no-show, and he arrives with Desert Storm vet, Zack (Bill Paxton), instead. The dialogue between the stranger and the group is clever, cold and frank and begins to take a dark turn when Zack, clearly quite effected and unhinged by the things he has seen, makes racist quips. He claims that whereas he has actually fought for something he believes in, none of the group present would ever stand to take up arms. Zack then pulls a knife on Marc and threatens to end him and rape his girlfriend, Paulie. After he throws Marc down and decides to take his leave, Pete decides to take up arms and threaten Zack in return who quickly pins him and breaks his arm. Marc, in quick haste, stabs Zack in the back with a kitchen knife and after a quick belch the Vet is soon dead.
The group all deal with the trauma in very different ways; Pete is on the floor crying about his arm, Marc is clearly quite shaken but open to the possibility of a better artistic career in prison upon Luke's comparison to Van Gogh. Paulie is rampant and upset, but the group decide to bury Zack in the garden without the intervention of the police.
It is during a morning scouting the papers for any reports of a missing person do Marc and Luke come up with the idea to invite someone over, listen to their views and then eliminate them from society if they are not concordant with their ideologies. After several bottles of wine and a lengthy discussion later, with parallels to Hitler, the group decides to follow suit. Their weapon of choice: poisoned wine in a clearly different bottle to the 'good wine' they lay on the table. The first guest, however, is a local Parish priest invited by Diaz' Jude. The priest seems full of good intention until he quips that 'gay people are a disease and AIDS is the cure'. With that in mind, Marc pours the priest his final glass of wine and he drops dead amidst the faked screams of the dinner party.
The body count begins to rack up, with the elimination of a misogynistic chauvinist, an anti-environmentalist, a Pro-life extremist and a hobo assailant amongst others. The tomatoes in the garden are now growing thanks to their 'evil' fertiliser and a strange obsession with them takes a hold on the group. They are pulverised into puree, dried out and eaten raw by the friends. Paulie grows increasingly upset and eventually takes a polar turn and becomes more sexual with Marc. Marc produces some of his best work through lack of sleep and Luke is becoming more cold. Paulie eventually notices that not even their dinner recipes are good enough any more, that they seem too focussed on killing people rather than actual discussion.
Pete finds out his car has been recovered by the sheriff and she questions him about if he has seen any of the men under suspicion of kidnapping and possibly killing a local teenage girl. One of the photos he sees is of Zack and upon her revelation to him later that the blood in his truck matched the girl's he believes the group are doing good. It is Luke, however, who notices the sheriff has further suspicions on the household when eavesdropping on a heated and frank discussion between Luke and Jude. He soon buries her in the tomato plot.
Their final guest is Norman Arbuthnot and the discussion at hand really pushes the group to their limits with listening to his thoughts and feelings. Without ruining the ending; it was sudden and quite a firm and gripping surprise with haunting Mark Mothersbaugh strings silencing the picture completely.
I couldn't recommend The Last Supper more. It is beautifully relevant to today's social climate and resonates cinematic feeling as previously shown in The Purge and television's Utopia, but on a very local level of extreme. The idea of sterilising humanity and purging out the wicked and the greedy are notes of discussion that ping up on media radars frequently and one that is dealt with hauntingly brilliantly here.
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