It’s your turn to get the check.

Friendly-Beast

Imagine life in a small restaurant. The kitchen wants better pay, the waitress wants a better life and the owner thinks the restaurant is one great review from being more popular. But it’s not an upscale restaurant. The owner gets berated by his wife, the one lonely customer is not leaving, it’s fifteen minutes from closing time and an annoying couple just walked in. Now it’s really late, the meals are hurriedly cooked and the owner is firing the kitchen staff for bringing the garbage into the dining room. Chaos reigns.

And two thugs just walked in with a gun.

You might think you know where this is going. So did I, but I was wrong. Director Gabriela Amaral Almeida locks us in with a group of people that are hiding secrets, agendas and possibly one or two psychopathic tendencies. The doors are locked. Nobody can get in or out. It’s psychological horror at its worst, and the thugs are just another victims.

Soon enough, someone is in control. Or has lost control completely, but you don’t question anything at gunpoint. The staff and the clientele are now hostages. In that mix, there will be people that will think they can talk their way out of it, people who want to run, people who want to fight and perhaps one of them who will decide to join in.

Outrageously enough, we get all choices as people give in to their own secret desires and inner madness. The movie goes for the perfect storm as the tormented personalities finally let out their demons and show how their repressed emotions and fevered dreams turn them into something lower than the animals they cook, serve and eat.

Recommended if you want to see a different type of horror, one born out of the mundanity of life. It’s simplistic, it’s animalistic and it’s purposefully basic. This is not some supernatural force bringing these people to the brink of sanity, but everyday people that go over that brink and are willing and able to put whoever they find through hell. The director has just chosen to bring it out to our table and serve it raw.

That will do for now.