‘The Last Supper’: the strange 1990s film about the morality of murder
Genre-bending movies that work as morality plays about the dangers posed by the wealthy and elitists have become increasingly prevalent throughout the 21st century, so if anything, The Last Supper deserves credit for being way ahead of its time, having been released in 1995.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Mark Mylod’s The Menu, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, and Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation are just a sampling of recent titles that dabble in similar themes. They may occupy different spaces ranging from socially conscious horror to razor-sharp satire via nail-biting thrills and absurdist comedic moments. Still, the one thing they have in common is there’s a single demographic placed in the crosshairs of the message.
If director Stacy Title’s acerbic black comedy were released today, then it would stand a much better chance of gaining more notice than it did almost 30 years ago. The cast alone is more than enough to pique interest, with Cameron Diaz playing the lead role and support coming from Annabeth Gish, Courtney B. Vance, Jason Alexander, Bill Paxton, Ron Perlman, and others.
The plot is darkly delicious and plays just as well today as it did back in the mid-1990s. A student gets a lift home from a truck driver and decides to repay the kindness by inviting him in for dinner. However, when the guest turns out to be a racist Holocaust denier with nothing but kind words to say about Adolf Hitler, hitchhiker Zack and his liberal college-age roommates are understandably taken aback.
When their dinner party gets violent, the students end up murdering the intruding party and burying him in the garden. On the surface, covering up a murder doesn’t sound as if it would spark a collective idea, but the close-knit group of buddies then decide to carry on in a similar vein by inviting people with conservative beliefs to dine with them. Should they decline to recant their statements or change their belief system, then they’ll end up dead, too.
A homophobic priest, a misogynist, a neo-Nazi, an anti-environmentalist, an antisemite, an anti-abortion activist, and a gay rights critic all come and go. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the characters have names, including Jude, Pete, Paulie, Marc, and Luke, making the biblical connotations as obvious as the title of The Last Supper itself.
The film doesn’t take sides even though it’s full of terrible people who believe abhorrent things and end up paying the price for them. The Last Supper never overlooks the fact that it’s the ‘heroes’ of the story who take it upon themselves to decide whether somebody has earned the right to live or die. That entirely depends on the alignment of their worldviews.
It’s gained a level of cult appreciation in the three decades since its release, but it’s still a little surprising The Last Supper hasn’t become a much bigger deal in recent years. After all, as mentioned above, many of its underlying sentiments have powered spiritually similar successors that have won plenty of acclaim and more than a few awards for trading in many of the same motifs, even if it’s slightly concerning as a society that the film remains as relevant now as it did in 1995.