Written by Marisa Carpico
Plot: When a recently discharged soldier arrives unannounced at the home of a deceased fellow soldier, the grieving Peterson family takes him in. Charming and polite, he quickly ingratiates himself with everyone he meets, but something sinister lurks beneath that façade.
I wouldn’t presume to guess the exact reason Pop-Break’s own Ann Hale correctly pegged You’re Next as 2013’s best horror movie, but what made it such an enjoyable surprise for me was Sharni Vinson’s heroine Erin. Level-headed, efficient and surprisingly deadly, she was a memorable addition to the pantheon of great scream queens. With The Guest, director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett add another great character to horror movie history—except this time, he’s the villain.
The titular “guest” comes in the form of a handsome, mysterious stranger named David Collins, who quickly ingratiates himself with the family of one of his fallen comrades when he appears at their rural home unannounced. As played by Dan Stevens (best known for portraying the sweet and harmless Matthew Crawley on PBS’s Downton Abbey), David is quiet, polite and assured. It’s no wonder that Mrs. Peterson (clearly still grieving her son’s presumably recent death) offers to let him stay for awhile. Yet there’s something off about his charming exterior. He is almost too perfect, and there is a quiet danger underneath it all that seems most obvious in his rare moments of solitude when he drops his confident smirk and stares menacingly into space.
Luke (Brendan Meyer), the lonely teenaged boy of the Peterson family, is the first to get a taste of how dangerous David can be. After noticing Luke is being bullied, David picks him up from school and asks him to point out the boys who have been hurting him. They follow them to a local bar where David insults their masculinity by ordering a round of cosmopolitans for the bullies and blow job shots for their girlfriends. The boys immediately pick a fight and David disposes of them without breaking a sweat, like a cocky Jason Bourne fighting for fun rather than to survive. Still, instead of alerting his parents to David’s actions, Luke admires and appreciates the help. And he isn’t the only member of the family taken in. Mrs. Peterson (Sheila Kelley) is grateful for David’s willingness to help around the house, and her husband is glad to have a partner in both conversation and drinking. In fact, the only member of the family who remains wary of David’s alluring mix of charm and menace is Maika Monroe’s Anna.
With her sexy goth attire, moody musical taste (collected on the film’s fantastic soundtrack), and frequent eye-rolling, Anna feels like a realistic portrait of a bored, small-town girl and provides a grounding contrast to David’s excess. Through her, Wingard and Barrett allow the audience to explore their fear of and fascination with David, especially how oddly sexy he is. Indeed, one of the most surprising and enjoyable aspects of Stevens’s performance is how sexually potent he makes David. Nowhere is that clearer than when an unsuspecting Anna pounds on the bathroom door thinking her brother is inside only to be surprised when David, his impressive physique barely concealed by the towel at his waist, steps out of the steamy bathroom instead. The moment is played for laughs and it’s not the only instance of levity in this surprisingly funny horror movie.
Perhaps the best is the film’s climax, which takes place insanely, wonderfully in a Halloween maze. The choice is audacious and shouldn’t work as well it does, but just as they showed in You’re Next, Wingard and Barrett know how to take a tired horror trope and make it fun again. Perhaps it’s a little early to say, but I’m already calling The Guest as the best horror movie of 2014.
Rating: 9/10
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