“Thank you for coming on this terrible day.” Sinner Supper Club takes place over the course of one afternoon and into the next morning. It is, by all accounts, a terrible day, but isn’t that when friends are supposed to show up and show out? Co-created by Daisy Rosato and Nora Kaye, Sinner Supper Club is a return to true mumblecore, where a group of friends come together, only to discover that everyone’s definition of their relationships differs. When that cat is let out of the bag, it poses an interesting question about where the group goes from there.
The film’s title comes from a get-together a group of friends would hold on a regular basis. They’d buy pretentious foods, gossip, and get wasted. The original Sinner Supper Club consisted of G (Genevieve Simon), Alice (Elise Kibler), Nora (Kaye), Jayae (Jayae Riley Jr.), and Sophie (Sophie Sagan-Gutherz). The number lessened by one after the death of Sophie. Part of the reason they’re all gathering is to remember Sophie, but also to say goodbye to G, who has been evicted from their apartment in New York City. Tagging along for the ride is Alice’s new partner, Ash (Ashil Lee), who is very much not welcome, despite being told to their face it’s fine for them to be here. When a heatwave hits, the group is trapped in G’s apartment and everything starts to come to light.
A friendship break-up is often far more brutal than any romantic one, but for the Sinner Supper Club group, it’s a combination of both. This group of queer people has messily kissed and had feelings for each other while often hiding behind the guise of friendship. Each member of the group is an archetype of the people you’d find in a friend circle of a certain size, and the situations where the audience first meets them tells us everything we need to know about who they are. Nora picks up an ice cream cake on a hot summer day and puts it in her backpack as she bikes to G’s house, where G is thoughtfully marinating lamb but hasn’t thought about how they’re going to cook it. Without saying much at all, Sinner Supper Club has made it obvious who these people are, why they would be drawn to each other at a point in time, and how they could inevitably splinter.
Courtesy of SXSW
The main reason for the party is G’s eviction. They’re doing something they swore they’d never do — move out of the city. Some people see leaving as giving up. G couldn’t quite hack it in the city, so they have to move back to a place that doesn’t afford them the same freedoms. Not only that, but they’re becoming disconnected from their entire community. We all say we’ll stay in touch when someone moves away, and technology has certainly made communication more feasible, but there’s something to be said about proximity. How strong does a friendship need to be to transcend space and time zones? For the friends in Sinner Supper Club, it might not be enough.
Social psychology has something called the Proximity Principle. It can be summed up as the idea that relationships are formed with those who are close by. Sinner Supper Club puts the Proximity Principle into devastating practice. It has notes of horror, but not in a gory way. Just the scary realization that the people you think you know and who you think you can rely on might not view you the same way. It all comes back to familiarity and humanity’s tendency to pick the path of least resistance. Why make new friends when these people are still here? Sinner Supper Club puts its characters in a pressure cooker, which is stressful enough, but there’s also a presence looming over them. It’s a ghost story where grief fills the spaces between these people without them even recognizing it.
Separation is natural, but that doesn’t make it any less painful. Some distance is forced, like when you lose a loved one, and others are a choice. Relationships have to be nurtured, trimmed, and pruned. An unmistakable amount of fight has to be present too. Not forcing a connection to exist where it doesn’t, but ensuring that time is invested and persevering. Sinner Supper Club is an ode to friendships — the ones that have ended, the ones hanging on for dear life, and the ones that last.
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