After the team of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett managed to flip the trope of the Final Girl on its head (and then stab a blender into it) with You’re Next, I was waiting intently to see what they would come up with next; so imagine my delight when they returned with The Guest. Whereas their previous collaboration took the notion of the final, female survivor of slasher films and confounded expectations by presenting us with a female lead that boasts a sizable killer instinct, their follow up focused more on the enigmatic, unstoppable killers that tended to pop up in movies throughout the 80s. Did you ever look at someone like Rutger Hauer’s blood chilling character in The Hitcher and wonder, who the fuck is that guy? Well, chances are that Wingard and Barrett did too and as a result, they delivered a blankly humorous thriller that also happened to recall John Carpenter at the height of his powers. You’ll be glad you invited The Guest round to stay.
The Peterson family as still trying to get over from the death of their eldest child, Caleb, who died while fighting in the war in Afghanistan, but one day, after answering a knock on the door, grieving mother, Laura, comes face to face with the charming David Collins. David is a former U.S. Army sergeant who claims he served with Caleb before he died and not only were the two good friends, but he promised to look in on the Petersons to watch over them. Father Spencer, daughter Anna and son Luke remain suspicious of the charismatic man, but soon his winning smile and earnest nature soon wins everyone over as he interjects his way into their lives.
One of the most obvious way he helps out is by following Luke’s bullies to a bar and systematically taking them apart after instigating a fight. With that out of the way, he continues to win over Spencer and Laura, but he finds Anna a tougher nut to crack as her mistrust still holds strong. However, ever the charmer, he finally gets through her defences after watching out for her at a party, but still being cool with her smoking weed and beating the shit out of the abusive boyfriend of Anna’s friend. Yep, David’s presence certainly seems to be making life for the Petersons a hell of a lot easier – but if you’re thinking that his presence is too good to be true, you’d be right.
It seems that knocking seven shades of crap out of the odd dickhead is one thing, orchestrating murder on behalf of someone random family is another and after Anna digs a little too deeply into David’s past, she triggers a part of the ex-soldier that proves to be extra deadly. Before you know it, a private military corporation is sniffing around while armed to the teeth and while that should tell you that David is not what he seems, reality proves to be far, far worse.
If You’re Next was Adam Wingard starting to break free of his indie, mumblecore origins, The Guest is the director forging a path into cult glory by wearing all of its inspirations clearly on its sleeve. Delving gleefully into 80s cinema, Wingard seems to find new energy in riffing of the kind of synth scores that came with the decade and giving the while film the same kind of stripped-back energy that the aforementioned Carpenter had back in his prime. But on top of this, the filmmakers create a delicious gumbo that stirs in such flavours as The Terminator, The Hitcher, The Stepfather and even strains of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark as it delivers a familiar plot concerning a stranger entering the lives of simple folk and ruthlessly turning it upside down into a nightmare.
However, what really makes The Guest so special is how it takes the fact that everyone watching has probably watched these kinds of films before and tailors its approach perfectly. One minute the movie is going exactly the way you’re thinking it will, but just when you think you’ve got it pegged, it ever so slightly alters it’s course to keep you off balance – but as much as it enjoys rug-pulling you at every opportunity, it never strays too far from the original concept. This means that you have the enjoyment of having the illusion of being three steps ahead of the plot, while it uses your familiarity to wrong foot you like a pro. The effect is absurdly enjoyable as you’re chuckling knowingly at the story, knowing full well what’s going to happen next, but it while the final destination is set, the method it takes to get there proves to be wildly unpredictable.
Until The Guest came out, Dan Stevens was primarily known for playing upper-class toffs in Downton Abbey, however, on the flip-side of the movie’s release, it established the actor and those piercing blue eyes as one to watch as he went from playing the the Beast part of Beauty & The Beast to being King Kong’s laid back dentist. However, here he positively radiates steely cool as he first charms, and then harms with equal effectiveness. When the film finally gives the game away that David is a Jason Bourne-esque super solider who has faked his death and has fixated on this one particular family, he gets even better as the movie gets even more blankly comedic when his training simply won’t allow him to let anyone to live after they discover his secret. Cue Stevens constantly pulling “Oh for fuck’s sake” expressions as he endures the inconvenience of people suddenly stumbling upon his lethal background and has to kill them with a shrug and a couple of hand grenades. Likewise, Maika Monroe enjoys the first punch of her one-two assault on 2014 (the second was If Follows), by playing the sullen, yet likable Anna who finds herself being bounced from suspicion to making an honest-to-god mix tape for David, to prospective victim as the unbelievable events start to unfurl.
Freed of the limitations of limiting himself to dour, underplayed tones and subtle swings, Wingard let’s his freak flag fly with impressive effect. Leaning hard on a electronic based soundtrack to go with that synth score, he assaults the screen with neons and bright colours that the earlier, more restrained looking A Horrible Way To Die and You’re Next and even sets his fiery climax in a Halloween maze set up in a high school. Tellingly, this doesn’t mean that Wingard and Barrett are itching to jump the shark and despite some spirited gunplay sequences, the duo keeps things nicely within the realms of exaggerated reality, scraping ludicrous but never tipping into full absurdity. The movie allows to to believe here or there that an utterly bizarre plot twist could actually happen (cyborg?), before instantly debunking it by having David smoke weed or bone one of Anna’s friends.
Some may feel that The Guest doesn’t go far enough, but I’d counter that it’s the slightly restrained nature of the plot that actually makes the wilder moments funnier. It’s cool, it’s exciting, it sent the trajectory of Wingard, Stevens and Monroe ever upward and it carries that honorary badge that all aspiring cult movies seem to do nowadays – use that font in their credits that John Carpenter used. Crazed soldier pops his sanity cap and starts killing his way to a better life for his surrogate family? Call that The Bourne Insanity.
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