BY KAREN BOSSICK

What if you held a dinner party and, inexplicably, your guests were unable to leave?

Of course, they might become hungry, unkempt, even hysterical. And, eventually, they might even turn on one another.

That sets the stage for the American premiere of Thomas Ades’s “The Exterminating Angel,” which will be shown Saturday, Nov. 18, at the Big Wood Cinemas in Hailey.

It starts at 11 a.m. and runs 2 hours and 40 minutes. Dick Brown will present a pre-opera lecture at 10:30 a.m. Admission is $16.

A busload of Senior Connection members will attend, thanks to a generous donation, said Senior Connection Director Teresa Beahen Lipman.

The film is part of the Met: Live in HD series sponsored by Sun Valley Opera and the theater. It is presented in English.

Ades’s new opera is based on the darkly comic Luis Bunuel film, which Community Library’s program director Scott Burton showed as part of the Ernest Hemingway Festival in September.

The film, released in 1962, has sometimes been thought to be a critique of the complacent Spanish society during the Franco era. It’s also seen as divine vengeance against a corrupt elite that is incapable of extricating itself from its state of inertia.

Ades composed the 2004 adaptation of “The Tempest.” He premiered “The Exterminating Angel” at the 2016 Salzburg Festival. Tom Cairns wrote the libretto and directs the production