The Birthday Party had its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival, 27 Feb 2026
The Birthday Party opens in 1965, with Greek shipping magnate Marcos Timoleon (Willem Dafoe) receiving news late one stormy night that his beloved – and only – son Daniel has been killed in a plane accident, while his 15-year-old daughter Sofia (Thalia Giannikou) listens in from a distance, excluded no less than Marcos’ faithful servant Kostas (Antonis Tsitsiopoulos) from the self-imposed loneliness of Marcos’ grief. Like her father, Sofia must suffer the loss of Daniel – but she is also being made aware that Marcos saw Daniel as the natural heir to his immense fortune, and her as an inferior scion. As soon as she is old enough, Sofia will leave the family’s private island, and her father’s influence – but it is hard to exit entirely this powerful man’s orbit.
The rest of Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s feature takes place ten years later, with Daniel’s absence still sending its ripples to the island’s shore as Marcos micromanages a future without a male descendant. Sofia (now played by Vic Carmen Sonne) is lured back to her childhood home for a party to celebrate her 25th birthday – although Marcos, a paranoid, surveillance-obsessed man who regards all relationships as transactional, has other reasons for drawing his daughter back into the fold.
Marcos’ second wife Olivia (Emma Suárez) is also there, hoping either to rekindle her relationship with Marcos or at least to finalise their divorce. Young journalist Ian Forster (Joe Cole), who has spent years researching Marcos’ history for a biography, has come too – as has the Marquis (Carlos Cuevas), Sofia’s childhood friend whom Marcos would like her to marry in a medieval dynastic arrangement to further his own business interests with the Marquis’ Franco-connected father. Various dignitaries, entrepreneurs, doctors, young women, undercover paparazzi and – as Olivia will succinctly put it – ‘other parasites’ are also in attendance, living it up at this most exclusive of gatherings.
Marcos has invited The Animals to perform live, and they will open their set with It’s My Life, a song that they released in 1965, the same year that Daniel died – and the film’s closing credits will be accompanied by a cover version (from Dafoe) of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, another song released by The Animals in 1965. It is as though Marcos is stuck in that year, unable to move on from Daniel’s death – although of course the lyrics of both songs resonate in other ways with the film’s themes (Sofia’s bid for independence; Marcos’ obsession with legacy, reputational or otherwise). Meanwhile, more irrationally, Sofia’s entrance to the party is accompanied intradiegetically by I Will Survive, a song which, though certainly capturing her determination to recover from her own childhood trauma and sense of being unloved, was not in fact released until 1978, three years after the explicit time of the party. Sofia, after all, represents the future, which is why Marcos is so eager to step in and take over, ensuring that she continue the family tradition in his own (deeply flawed) image whether she likes it or not.
“Is it pure fiction, or is it based on true events?”, Sofia asks Ian in regard to the biography of Marcos that he has been writing. That book is a mise en abyme of The Birthday Party itself, which is after all painting us a life portrait of Marcos – and Sofia’ question applies equally to our understanding of the film, even if any answer will be complicated at best. For Jimenéz, Giorgos Karnavas and Nicos Panayotopoulos’ screenplay, freely adapted and greatly compressed from Panos Karnezis’ 2007 novel of the same name, is drawn – with considerable artistic licence – from the real life of Aristotle Onassis, who was also a shipping tycoon who lived on a private Greek island and lost his son to a plane accident. At the same time, the film’s structure is borrowed from Shakespeare’s fantasia The Tempest, in which another manipulative father plots his daughter’s future when guests come to their island. Yet this is also, in keeping with its Mediterranean setting, a classic Greek dynastic/domestic tragedy, as one man’s hubris leads to a fall. Significantly, Marcos’ dog is named Icarus.
So here truth and fiction are in constant competition. A tapestry hanging on the wall of Marcos’ palatial home and depicting a unicorn is brought to life as the Marquis presents Sofia with a horse from his stable with a (fake) horn placed on its forehead. And another classical painting of a wild orgy in the house’s interior will soon be reenacted in and around the pool as the night progresses into drunken debauchery. There is a sense of unreality in this hermetic island whose every detail Marcos, Prospero-like, controls or tries to control, despite the inevitable laws of gravity and nature. Yet as Marcos seeks also to control every aspect of his daughter’s existence, and to take even her own choice away, he will once again drive a wedge between himself and everyone else, leaving him right where he started, alone and unhappy, isolated in the space where a grounded wharf meets the infinite sea beyond.
Marcos’ doctor Patrick (Cristos Stergioglou) tells his old friend, speaking of his smoking habit, “If you don’t destroy yourself, no one will” – and indeed, this is ultimately a tale of a man who has everything, yet who sets about utterly alienating all the people who love him, and in so doing, makes a ruin of his family and an island of himself. Against the explicit backdrop of Franco‘s declining dictatorship, Marcos is himself a fascist (of the domestic kind), facing his own last days. As Marcos imperiously parades his nudity before his servants, and insists that everyone is naked under their glamorous outfits, he indeed proves to be an emperor with no clothes. So The Birthday Party paints an unflattering picture of any would-be tyrant, whether in the home, or on the global stage – for here power and patriarchy are stripped of their decorous trappings and exposed to the tempestuous elements.
strap: Onassis island: Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s domestic drama sees a tycoon tyrannically managing his daughter like one of his businesses
© Anton Bitel
