I heard quite a few good words regarding last year’s The Guest, a low budget suspense thriller/horror film, and was curious to see it. Yesterday I finally had a chance.
Did it live up to what I read?
Yes…and no.
The Guest has a simple enough plot: A stranger who calls himself David (Dan Stevens, who for the most part is excellent here) appears at the front door of the Peterson family home, which is in a remote, rustic town and introduces himself to the lady of the household (Sheila Kelley) as a soldier who fought alongside her recently deceased son.
Anna Peterson is taken aback by David’s story and excuses herself to have a cry. When she composes herself and returns to the man’s side, she finds him looking at photographs on her mantle. One of them, David points out, shows him with her son’s squad.
David then says he has to go but Anna Peterson will not have it and invites him to stay over for at least a little while.
Big mistake.
For as the film plays out and the members of Anna’s family, including her husband, her other son and daughter, meet David and have different reactions to him, we find that the charismatic soldier may not be quite who he says he is. All the while, things escalate out of control and the body count rises.
I’ll say this much for The Guest: It wastes very little time in delivering its premise while building up tension. The acting, for the most part, is uniformly good and, as already mentioned, Dan Stevens delivers a terrific charismatic/creepy performance as the titular guest.
But when all is said and done, The Guest wound up leaving me with too many questions while delivering a climax that was equal parts silly, ridiculous, and sadistic.
Among the questions I had, the biggest one was this: Why did David bother going to the Peterson family in the first place? It was made quite clear in the film that he is a self-sufficient man who thinks on his feet and is quite capable of disappearing into the woodwork. Without going too deeply into SPOILERS, why does David tie himself down to this one place and, effectively, risk making himself known, especially (OK, MILD SPOILERS HERE!) to those who want to get at him?
It makes no real sense.
The lingering questions and your all too typical “bad guy isn’t quite killed” finale cliche (is it written in some movie making bible that every horror movie with a boogeyman type killer has to end this way?!) wind up hurting the movie just when it was about to cross the finish line.
Because of this, I can only offer a mild recommendation for The Guest. Despite some very good acting and some effectively creepy moments, the film’s lack of answers for many questions and cliched ending hurt what is for the most part a very effective piece of work.
A special note: I loved the use of 80’s alternative electronica music in the film. I suspect the filmmakers were going for a John Carpenter type vibe (the movie has more than a couple of nods to the original Halloween). It worked!