AllMovie

With his English-language political thriller The Feast of the Goat, action helmer Luis Llosa cinematizes Mario Vargas Llosa's sweeping, epic novel about the myriad of events leading up to the assassination of a real-life tyrannical despot. The story opens in 1992, when a Dominican émigré attorney, Urania Cabral (Isabella Rossellini) leaves her new home in the U.S. and heads back to her native country, for the first occasion in decades. She intends to confront her father, 80-year-old Augustin (Tomas Milian), about his former employment in the government of the supremely corrupt dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (Tomas Milian). The film then flashes back to the events surrounding the assassination of Trujillo on a highway in late May of 1961, by delving into the lives and motives of each of the participants - from Amadito (Juan Diego Botto), whom Trujillo forced to execute his future brother-in-law, to that victim's father (Murphy Guyer), to Antonio (David Zayas), the brother of an incriminating witness whom Trujillo's men executed. One by one, as their stories are disinterred, the assassins gather on a nighttime road, brandishing guns, and prepare to shoot Trujillo and throw his body into the trunk of a car. Paul Freeman, Stephanie Leonidas and Richard Bekins co-star; Llosa co-authored the script with Augusto Cabada and Zachary Sklar.