‘The Dinner’ Berlin Review: Laura Linney, Steve Coogan Cram Too Much on Their Plate

At once a darkly comic social satire, a pitch-black moral thriller and an earnest plea to recognize mental illness, “The Dinner” is a seven-layer dip overflowing with compelling individual ingredients that, when mixed together, make the finished dish awfully difficult to digest.

Middle-aged misanthropes Paul (Steve Coogan, pulling off an American accent that sounds uncannily like Willem Dafoe) and Claire (Laura Linney, thankfully getting to sink her teeth into a role again) are off to the chicest restaurant in town for a meal they dread alongside a couple they abhor.

Throughout its first third, “The Dinner” barrels forward on belly laughs provided by Coogan’s acid glare, Gere’s slightly tinned charm and writer-director Moverman’s pitch perfect skewering of pretentious modern gastronomy.

(Linney and Hall get their times to shine later.) Moverman and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski (“99 Homes”) keep both the action and the actors rather dimly lit in the foreground, while bathing background surfaces in a garish neon glow, creating a somewhat unsettling, vaguely sinister look and feel less befitting a class-based comedy than it does a searing psychological thriller.

As it becomes clear that this dinner was called to deal with the fallout of this sick crime (which Moverman depicts unsparingly — there’s no ambiguity that these are some messed-up kids), the film shifts into third gear, becoming a kind of moral meditation on crime, punishment and consequence.

Without exaggeration, “The Dinner” touches on themes of societal shame regarding mental illness, the lasting legacy of the Civil War, the nature of politics, race and racism in families, the American school system, upper-middle-class hypocrisy, the deleterious effects of the internet and so, so much more.