Film

The Exterminating Angel

Buñuel's dinner party goes catastrophically, inexplicably wrong: after a lavish evening, none of the guests can bring themselves to leave the room, and nobody — not them, not the staff, not the film — can say why. Etiquette curdles into savagery over the following days, deadpan and dreamlike. It's for anyone who enjoys watching the rich discover exactly what they're made of.

TMDb rating7.9

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Parasite2019

Bong Joon-ho's class satire has the same gift for turning polite social ritual into a trap, escalating from awkward comedy of manners into something much darker without losing its nerve.

But The tonal swerve into violence in the back half surprises people who came expecting pure comedy.

Parasite poster

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie1972

Buñuel's own later riff on the same joke, except this time the rich can never actually get to eat the meal. If you loved the original's logic, this is its mirror image.

But It's even looser and more dreamlike, with less plot to hold onto — some find it repetitive rather than escalating.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie poster

The Platform2019

A vertical prison where food descends floor by floor becomes a brutal, blackly funny allegory about scarcity and class — the same trapped-room premise pushed into full horror.

But It's far gorier and more literal in its metaphors than Buñuel ever bothered to be.

The Platform poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

No Exit1954no page yet

Both films trap a group indefinitely and use the confinement to strip away social pretense — Buñuel's surrealism and Sartre's existentialism arrive at the same claustrophobic idea from opposite directions.

Sartre's damned trio, stuck for eternity in a locked room, decided over a decade before Buñuel that hell is simply other people you cannot leave — same premise, played as pure philosophy.

But It's stagebound and talky, lifted almost verbatim from the play — no dream logic, no surrealism, just relentless dialogue.

More like this (8)

Triangle of Sadness2022

Ruben Östlund traps the rich on a luxury yacht and lets seasickness do what starvation does in Buñuel — strip away every last pretension, spectacularly and disgustingly.

But The infamous vomiting sequence isn't for the squeamish, and the satire is broader and blunter than Buñuel's.

Triangle of Sadness poster

The Rules of the Game1939

Renoir's country-house farce, made decades earlier, is the ancestor of every film about the wealthy behaving badly under one roof — witty, elegant, quietly devastating.

But The humour is drier and the pace more theatrical; it asks for patience rather than delivering shocks.

The Rules of the Game poster

The Menu2022

A luxury dinner turns into a trap with a far more literal appetite for revenge — glossy, mean, and very funny about guests who think they deserve to be there.

But It's a slicker, more plot-driven thriller; the ambiguity and dream-logic of Buñuel are swapped for a tidy premise.

The Menu poster

Force Majeure2014

A family holiday exposes exactly the kind of social performance Buñuel skewers — one instinctive moment undoes years of composure, and the fallout is agonisingly, hilariously observed.

But It's a much smaller, quieter film — one family rather than a whole trapped society.

Force Majeure poster

Cube1998

Strangers trapped in a shifting geometric prison with no explanation for how they got there — the same inexplicable confinement and slow unravelling of civility, reworked as lean genre horror.

But The mystery is mechanical rather than social; don't expect the class commentary to be the point.

Cube poster

Abigail's Party1977no page yet

Mike Leigh's queasy suburban dinner party is a masterclass in comedy of embarrassment — no surreal trap needed, just excruciating hosts and guests who cannot escape each other.

But It's stagier and far smaller in scale — one evening of social discomfort rather than existential horror.

Big Brother2000

Buñuel's surreal trap becomes a literal architectural one: a house nobody can leave, cameras watching status and etiquette dissolve exactly as he predicted, minus the metaphor.

The literal, unscripted version of Buñuel's premise: put people in a house they cannot leave, film what happens to their manners after a few weeks, watch civility curdle in real time.

But It's reality television with none of the artistry or ambiguity — the same social experiment stripped of any point beyond entertainment.

Big Brother poster

Dead Poets Society1989

Both use a party as a stage for exposing what the wealthy really are beneath their manners; Society just takes the elite's consumption of everything around them and makes it literal, slimy, and comic.

A gleeful, gross-out B-movie about the rich literally consuming the lower classes at their parties — Buñuel's polite cannibalism of manners made grotesquely, hilariously physical.

But It's cheap, campy, and proud of its practical-effects gore — this is trash cinema, not arthouse satire.

Dead Poets Society poster

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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Clue, Dogtooth, The Platform, mother!, The Old Dark House