Carnage turns 15 this year. Roman Polanski's black comedy puts two sets of parents in one Brooklyn apartment after their sons get into a schoolyard fight, and the polite conversation meant to settle things quickly curdles into something far messier.
Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly carry the entire film as the two couples, trading pleasantries and jabs until neither pair leaves the visit unscathed. It runs a lean 80 minutes and never once leaves the apartment, so every shift in mood lands directly on the four of them. Carnage holds a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, respectable for a film that is really just an extended argument dressed up as a dinner party.
The script grows out of Yasmina Reza's play God of Carnage, which won a Tony after its Broadway run and had already played Zurich, Paris and London before Reza and Polanski adapted it for the screen, moving the setting from Paris to Brooklyn.
That Brooklyn address never existed. Polanski could not travel to the United States while making the film, so the entire apartment was built on a soundstage outside Paris. Production designer Dean Tavoularis had American appliances, switches and door hardware shipped over so the rooms would read as authentically New York, and the skyline glimpsed through the windows was painted in rather than shot on location.
Fifteen years on, it still works as a study in how quickly civility breaks down once nobody wants to be the one who apologizes first. If it has been a while since 2011, the apartment holds up.
