A low-budget groove. A synthy soundtrack. Garish purple titling in a splattery font. A love of just-as-splattery violence. The Guest is, from head to toe, a throwback to cult ‘80s cinema. You can practically picture writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard (of last year’s You’re Next) scuttling up to daddy John Carpenter and eagerly showing him their doodles, hoping that he’ll tell them how great they look and give them the best spot on the fridge. Their movie is good for some cheap thrills, and will probably satisfy fans whose nostalgia it seeks to tweak, but I couldn’t jibe with it.
The eponymous guest is David, played by Cousin Matthew from Downton Abbey with a not-too-bad Southern accent (Yes, the actor’s name is Dan Stevens, but he’ll always been Cousin Matthew to me. Always.) He arrives on the doorstep of the Peterson family and tells them he’s an Army buddy of their eldest son, Caleb, whose recent death in Afghanistan they’re still mourning. David’s perfect manners and eager helpfulness manage to make everyone overlook his very obvious robotic offness, and he soon finds himself a temporary resident in the Peterson home. All seems well at first, but after a rash of strange deaths begins hitting some of the people close to the family, daughter Anna (Maika Monroe) begins to suspect David is not what he seems.
The Guest’s sense of suspense is utterly wonky. Even if the music and editing weren’t blatantly telling the audience David is bad news even before he gives any reason to doubt him, the mystery isn’t complicated enough to sustain the film for as long as it drags things out. It’s pretty obvious what David is as soon as certain signifiers get dropped (secret files, false identities, false deaths, and government contractors — not hard to figure out what that’s pointing to), but the movie spins along far past the point where the penny’s dropped. There are so many repetitive scenes of David being sinister with a capital S with no one suspecting a thing.
But then, the movie isn’t trying to be too mysterious. It is well aware of its audience, which is savvy and knows what to expect from these genre trappings. These moments come to inject more excitement for the viewers, winding them up for the moment when they get to indulge their lust for blood. And the film is all too happy to give it to them, eventually collapsing all sense of pacing into a half-hour series of killings. Many of these moments are played for cheers (which my audience was happy to supply), even though, in every case, it’s David, who is most assuredly a bad guy, set up against people who are trying to stop him, or innocent bystanders.
David being a soldier casts a political tone over the movie, which I think is trying to go for some kind of allegory or satire here. Maybe something about unchecked military bloodwrath or whatever. I can’t buy it, though. It’s really hard to dissect American kill-happiness while gleefully playing to it. It’s not even a Paul Verhoeven-esque case where the joke is really on the audience.
There’s one interesting dimension to the story, and it comes in the form of Luke (Brendan Meyer), the youngest Peterson sibling. When he finds out that David is a cold-blooded killer, he doesn’t care, because David’s helped him learn to deal with the bullies who once plagued him. This is in stark contrast to the obliviousness of Luke’s parents (Sheila Kelly and Leland Orser, who do nothing besides…well, be oblivious) and Anna’s sleuthing (although her plight to get people to listen to her easily makes her into something close to an actual emotional center). I imagined a movie where all the Petersons found out what David was, only to not care, because his murder was in the service of their social betterment. There’s a sly metaphor for America’s attitude towards its armed services — we’ll turn a blind eye both to their suffering and their atrocities, but we’ll gladly use them when we see a chance to.
There are few things worse than when you watch a movie like The Guest (which isn’t even terrible — just slightly south of all right) and pine more for what it could have been, especially when that feeling is the strongest impression you’re left with. For sure, there are some solid action beats in the film, and Cousin Matthew does a nice job making his case for playing Captain America should Chris Evans ever find a way to escape the Marvel actor compound. But The Guest wastes its potential by pandering to its base, which is one way it’s similar to how the troops are used in politics, I suppose.
