Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.
It’s fun when a movie goes in a direction that you don’t expect. Because The Guest is on the They Shoot Zombies list, I knew this would eventually turn into a horror movie, but I wasn’t sure exactly how it was going to turn into a horror movie. On the surface, this looks like it could be a lot of things, and while thriller is certainly a possibility (and it’s closer to a thriller in a lot of ways than straight horror), there are moments when it looks like it might be a comedy or even a romance. I respect that in a film. Keep the audience guessing.
The Guest doesn’t start out like a horror movie, but we’re going to get some real hints that it’s going to dive head-first into horror. We begin with the realization that the Peterson family has lost a son in military service. Shortly after this, a man named David Collins (Dan Stevens) arrives and tells them that he knew their son in the service. David is good-looking and plenty charming and has soon gotten Laura Peterson (Sheila Kelley) to invite him to stay with them for a few days. David’s claim is that he promised Laura’s son Caleb that he would look after them.
We are soon introduced to the rest of the Peterson clan. This includes Anna (Maika Monroe), who is kind of attracted to David but also leery of him, Laura’s husband Spencer (Leland Orser), and son Luke (Brendan Meyer), who is bright but also a high school outcast and a frequent target of bullies because he’s gay. David spots a bruise on Luke’s cheek and hears about Spencer’s issues at work and his inability to get a promotion. He deals with Luke’s issue first, following his bullies into a bar (since we’re in small town nowhere, high school athletes are treated like royalty and essentially allowed to drink in public), where he confronts them, beats them senseless, and bribes the bar owner (a bribe that includes knowing the kids were underaged) to silence.
At this point, there is a sense of badassery to David. This is exactly the sort of behavior we’ve seen from heroes in action movies before—they confront the bullies and beat them at their own game and walk away without consequence. David does the same thing at a party, which ingratiates him to Anna and her friend Kristen (Tabatha Shaun). At the party, he also inquires about buying a gun from Anna’s friend Craig (Joel David Moore).
And now is when things start to unravel for our opinion of David and any hope that The Guest would end up being a standard action movie or even something that might wind up in a romance. Anna, still suspicious of David, makes a few calls and discovers that David Collins is supposed to be dead. Meanwhile, he meets with Craig and another guy ostensibly to buy a weapon, but actually kills both of them and takes their entire stock. It is also discovered around this time that Spencer’s boss has died under mysterious circumstances, and Spencer has finally received the promotion that he has wanted. In the background, Anna’s phone calls have alerted the military to the evident real threat of David Collins walking around in the outside world, and a team headed up by Major Richard Carver (Lance Reddick) is dispatched.
The third act of The Guest is essentially a murder rampage conducted by David as he tries to live out the mission that he has been trained on. A typical horror movie would see our killer slowly stalking his victims, hunting them down and playing with them as a way to increase the tension in the audience. We’re not going to get that here. Instead, David kills as a matter of necessity, and does so with the same level of emotion as he would have slicing a loaf of bread. When someone has outlived their usefulness to him, he shoots them without fanfare or a quip and walks away, dropping grenades into dinners and stabbing whomever might have witnessed his actions.
The Guest is a hard film not to like at some level because it takes itself exactly as seriously as it needs to for it to get its point across. It builds relatively slowly, but it’s clear where it wants to go once we see how David gets his guns and we hear that Spencer’s boss has died in a very unusual and compromised way. After that, we’re waiting to see just how far it’s going to go, and David does not disappoint in this respect. The deaths in this movie are not particularly grisly. They aren’t what I used to call “quality kills” from my early slasher-watching days. They’re just cold and unemotional, and kind of more terrifying because of that.
The Guest won’t be everyone’s taste, but it’s got a lot going for it.
Why to watch The Guest: The kills are matter-of-fact, and disturbing because of it.
Why not to watch: The resolution of the film doesn’t really work.
I have heard about this film as it has been in my watchlist for years.
ReplyDeleteI don't love the way the film ends. It's not the worst ending I've ever seen, but it feels very "monster movie" in large part. It doesn't really fit tonally with the rest of the movie.
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