TIFF 2025: Dinner with Friends
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There are few things I love more in movies and television than a dinner party. One of the visual mediums best settings, dinner parties are a great way to force characters to interact, put a microscope on fraying bonds, and give everyone plenty of meat to chew on, no pun intended. Dinner with Friends is a worthy entry into the canon, highlighting a group of friends who age, place in life, and wants are at times at odds with each other and themselves.
The movie kicks off with married couple Joy and Malachi returning home from a run and lamenting the fact that they haven’t seen their friends in a minute. This sparks Joy to invite the friends over for the first in a series of dinners held over the course of a couple of years between the friend group. We watch the group as they reach new life moments and bicker like only people who know you well can.
What I think I appreciated most about this movie is that it doesn’t seek to provide easy answers and solutions to its characters. The script written by Sasha Leigh Henry and Tania Thompson is so sharp in its observations about a whole host of life’s challenges, and they make sure their characters have to go through it. By focusing on multiple dinners, we get a much broader swath of issues and moments to cover and the movie is stronger for it. Even if certain storylines end happy or feel more contrived, there is a kernel of truth in every moment.
Not just content to be a movie about people talking, director Sasha Leigh Henry and her cinematographer Grant Cooper use some really fascinating filmmaking techniques to capture the events. From a camera slowly panning in a circle as the tension ratchets up to the changes in lighting, each dinner is shot with care, but crackling with energy.
In terms of performances, there isn’t a bad one in the bunch, but the triumvirate of Tatiana Jones, Tymika Tafari, and Rakhee Morzaria truly make the movie special, allowing us as the audience to empathize with their characters while still standing their ground in ever fascinating ways.
The only major fault that I found with the film is that tit feels as though the gay couple escapes some of the mess that their straight counterparts have to deal with. It’s almost an idealized portrayal of the cool gays who don’t want to get involved in the child rearing aspect of life, a fact that Josh mentions out loud after a particularly crazy dinner gathering. However, they don’t get much in the way of life changes and also aren’t forced to look in the mirror via their friends as much as the straight couples do. Josh is a character that gives a LOT and it would have been great to see him get a bit more. In the words of my internet friend Jullian, “Give that sissy something to do!” Even with this issue, Dinner with Friends was still among the best movies I saw at TIFF this year, and is a movie everyone will hopefully get the chance to see.
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