Film Review: The Guest
The Guest who keeps on giving.
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Hawke’s Bay
The Guest
Writer/Director Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett
The writer/director team of Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett's latest film The Guest relies heavily on several genres – Western, cops, horror and kids adventure.
Set in contemporary rural America it starts off with the old Western trope of the unknown cowboy arriving in the lawless town to set about ridding the town of the baddies. In this case it’s David who has just left the army and come to pay his condolences to the parents of a dead soldier he served with.
He becomes part of the family gaining the trust of the parents and children, teaching the young boy how to stand up to bullies, advising the daughter about love choices and saving the mother and son from the possibility of the boy being expelled from school.
We soon start to realise that he always achieves these happy outcomes through violence or the threat of violence. Is he a vengeful angel, a smiling assassin or merely a psychotic killer. The film keeps us confused as it moves from the warmhearted Shane to a mix of Terminator and any of those films about the FBI riding to the rescue in the huge SUV’s.
There is also a nod to the horror genre with final confrontation taking place in a Halloween stage set. As David, the quiet soldier, Dan Stevens (Mathew Crawley in Downtown Abbey} gives a steely performance, keeping the audience guessing about his quest, his morality and his sanity.
He is nicely balanced by the more moralistic children – Maika Monroe's as the enquiring Anna and Brendan Meyer as the withdrawn Luke. There some individual great sequences but because Wingard and Barrett play with the genres so much, they keep managing to confuse the comedy, drama and storylines
John Daly-Peoples
Fri, 07 Aug 2015
Fri, 07 Aug 2015
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Film Review: The Guest
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