The last time writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard teamed up for a feature, the results were 2011’s You’re Next, a film that earned quite a lot of buzz in film critic circles thanks to its style, humor, and the way it was able to add several intelligent spins on the usual home invasion movie formula. You’re Next was a lot of fun. As good as it was, it still didn’t manage to hint at the true potential these two had as a filmmaking team though—potential that has now been revealed and realized thanks to their latest stab at the thriller genre, The Guest, which takes the style, fun, and intelligence of their work on You’re Next, pumps them full of horse steroids, and then elevates them up even a couple levels higher thanks to a handful of truly first-rate performances. To put things simply, watching The Guest was the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater in a really long time. It starts off fun, it continues to get increasingly more fun, and then it climaxes in a big finish that’s pretty much everything great about genre movies distilled down into a powerful potion that overwhelms all of your senses as soon as it hits you.
The film stars Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) as a mysterious stranger, allegedly named “David,” who one day shows up on the doorstep of a fairly average American family and fairly immediately inserts himself into their daily routines. You see, the oldest child in the family, Caleb, was a soldier who went away to war and never came back, and the story David is telling is that they served together, and not only were they great friends, but he was also there in the last moments of his life. In that moment, David allegedly made a promise to check up on Caleb’s family, assure them all that he loved them, and to do anything he could to make sure they were all doing okay. I say that Stevens’ character is “allegedly” named David and that his telling of past events is his story rather than his reality because of the character’s overtly mysterious nature. This being a thriller rather than a tear-jerking drama, of course there’s something fishy going on—something murderously fishy, as it turns out.
The first positive that jumps out in regards to why The Guest is a truly extraordinary movie is its storytelling. The way Barrett paced his narrative is masterful. You’re thrown immediately into the situation of this stranger showing up at this family’s door and claiming that he has a connection to them, so there isn’t a whole lot of setup that needs to be sat through, but there’s still room for the characters to eventually become properly established, because the danger surrounding David builds slowly and deliberately, leaving plenty of time to study their lives. Little by little we get to know these people better, and little by little we begin to understand that they’re in much more danger than we initially thought, to the point where, by the time everything cuts loose and becomes completely crazy, you’re absolutely invested in the fates of each of the principal players.
Which, mentioning the craziness of the third act, brings us to the topic of tone. The Guest isn’t the sort of psychological thriller that you’re likely expecting it to be. David isn’t an obsessive or a psychopath. He’s not duplicitously trying to become a part of these people’s lives out of any sort of mental illness or plan to manipulate them. None of the scenarios from other movies in this genre, like Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, or Single White Female, get repeated here. Instead of the tone of bleakness and misery that thrillers usually establish, The Guest shoots more for a tone of joyful exploitation, even as it maintains a taut tension thanks to its central mystery. This film is far too interesting to stick to a formula or to simply exist as a retread, and David is far too interesting a character for you to predict how he’s going to behave thanks to movies you’ve seen in the past.
Of course, a big reason why he’s so interesting is Stevens’ performance, which constantly hints at hidden motivations and suppressed emotions, but is still subtle enough to never give any secrets away. You can’t take your eyes off of Stevens as you try to figure out exactly who David is and what he wants, and he seems to be having great fun milking the attention and making the bizarre sort of choices that keep everyone guessing. When David’s conning the people around him, Stevens just oozes soothing sincerity, and whenever he gets a moment alone you can instantly perceive all of that authenticity drain from his face, to the point where the contrast is kind of horrific. In Stevens’ hands David is one part Hans Gruber doing his American accent in Die Hard and one part Schwarzenegger playing the T-800 in The Terminator, and it’s glorious to behold. Fans of Downton Abbey already knew that this guy had movie star looks and that he could be quite charming, but even his work on that acclaimed program failed to hint at the layered performance he gives here, as well as to the overpowering magnetism he’s able to conjure up. Stevens’ is a star-making performance if I’ve ever seen one.
Despite the fact that his houseguest character gets much of the focus, it should be said that this movie isn’t a one man show though. The family that he’s imposed himself on are the real protagonists of the film—especially the teenaged daughter, played by Maika Monroe—and each of the actors chosen to make up the quartet adds a unique flavor to what proves to be a strong ensemble. Sheila Kelley plays the mother, and her rawness and open wound vulnerability stemming from the death of her son works well to keep the film emotionally grounded, even in the face of all the ridiculous violence and black humor that could have otherwise turned it into a farce. Leland Orser plays the exasperated, alcoholic father, and his drinking problem adds quite a bit of the aforementioned dark humor to the proceedings. Brendan Meyer plays the younger son, and not only does he seem to be a promising young actor who can already project adult emotions, his character also approaches peril with a youthful naïveté that helps along the story’s tension-building quite a bit. By far the most impressive member of the cast outside of Stevens is Monroe though. She shoulders the bulk of the film’s drama and serves as the eyes through which we experience its second half, and she’s relatable and believable whenever on screen. Thanks to her work in this film, she’s more than proved she has what it takes to be a leading lady going forward.
Ultimately, it’s that magic that gets generated when Wingard and Barrett’s sensibilities meet that’s what makes The Guest such a special movie though. When you watch the stuff that they make you can tell that they have a deep and abiding love for movie history, and that they’ve thought a lot about how they can utilize the things that made the genre films they grew up with great while also putting their own unique stamp on the existing archetypes, so that they can keep pushing film forward rather than just capitalizing on the past. The Guest doesn’t look like a movie that was made in the 80s, but when you’re watching it, it feels like you’re watching something experimental and exciting like so many movies from that era did.
Of course, that said, it does still manage to put a couple nods to the past on display. Its soundtrack sounds so much like a pulsing, high-energy John Carpenter score that anyone who grew up in the 80s won’t be able to keep from feeling like they’re reliving their childhood of scouring the VHS racks for mind-bending oddities as they listen to it. The music really adds to the dread and danger that permeates the whole film, and it especially adds energy to the scenes toward the end where things finally cut loose. By the time I reached that climactic scene I mentioned earlier—the one that’s set in an ingenious location that offers up a buffet of visual, sonic, and storytelling stimulation—I found that I was absent-mindedly pumping my fist in the air along with the music’s beat because I was having so much fun. The Guest is the very best film I’ve seen so far in 2014.
