A private island, a wealthy man, and a party full of guests who all want something from him: that’s the whole engine of “The Birthday Party,” and it never quite finds a higher gear.
Willem Dafoe plays Marcos Timoleon, a wealthy man throwing an extravagant birthday party for Sofia, played by Vic Carmen Sonne, on his exclusive private island sometime in the late 1970s. Emma Suárez circles the edges as Olivia. Each guest at this party has a reason for being there, and Miguel Ángel Jiménez, who directed the film, wants us to watch those reasons rub against each other.
Trailer, via Heretic Films.
Marcos Timoleon’s Island
The setup is promising. A birthday party is a closed system: nobody can leave, nobody can say what they really mean, and the host is trapped playing gracious even as people work him for money, favors, and old wrongs. Dafoe understands that trap. He plays Marcos as a man performing warmth while doing arithmetic behind his eyes, and it’s the best reason to watch this film.
Vic Carmen Sonne’s Sofia should be the true center of the night, since it’s her birthday, but the script keeps handing focus to the wealthy man instead. Emma Suárez gets even less to work with. Olivia drifts through scenes as a presence rather than a person, and by the time the party winds down, we still don’t know what she actually wants.
The Party Never Speeds Up
The film’s problem isn’t its cast. It’s pace. Jiménez, working from a script he wrote with Giorgos Karnavas and Nicos Panayotopoulos, treats every conversation at this party like it’s building toward something sudden, and some of them are — but the film takes its time getting there in a way that drains suspense rather than building it.
IndieWire praised the film, calling it “This is a riveting film, even if you know where it’s going.” That’s true in stretches. There are scenes here that work purely on the strength of watching two people talk around a subject without saying it out loud. But too many other scenes just sit there, waiting for the next guest to arrive with the next demand, and the film never finds a way to make the waiting itself feel valuable.
The Guest List
Part of the trouble is in how the story is put together. A tale built entirely around people approaching one man with wants and demands needs those demands to grow, to meet, to force Marcos into choices that cost him something visible. Instead the film mostly lets the demands sit side by side, like place settings, without much meeting between them.
The people circling Marcos at his party all carry their own private ends, as the film’s own summary states.
That list is the film’s true subject, and it’s a good one.
The problem is that Jiménez lines these figures up rather than setting them against each other, so the party never builds the way a party like this should.
Willem Dafoe Holds the Center
Dafoe is doing serious work here, and it’s worth seeing the film for him alone. He plays Marcos as a man who has spent decades mistaking control for love, and there’s a real sadness underneath the performance even when the film around him is coasting. Every time the pace flags, he’s the one holding the screen together.
The film clearly wants to be a tight, controlled piece of writing about power and duty, and it has the cast to pull that off. What it doesn’t have is the discipline to cut scenes that repeat the same idea twice, and by its final stretch that lack shows.
A party drama lives or dies on the sense that things are getting worse in real time. This one keeps circling back to the same relation between Marcos and his guests without tightening it, and 103 minutes starts to feel considerably longer than that.
By the Numbers
- Title: “The Birthday Party” (2026)
- Director: Miguel Ángel Jiménez
- Writers: Miguel Ángel Jiménez, Giorgos Karnavas, Nicos Panayotopoulos
- Running time: 103 minutes
- Cast: Willem Dafoe, Emma Suárez, Vic Carmen Sonne
- Rotten Tomatoes score: 56%
“The Birthday Party” has a strong lead performance, a good premise, and a script that never finds the urgency its own setup demands. Dafoe makes Marcos Timoleon worth watching even when the film around him stalls, but a polished surface and a fine cast can’t cover for a story content to circle its own dinner table. It’s handsome, well-acted, and far too patient with itself.
