Creepy Crawley
The Guest / directed by Adam Wingard
So now we know the truth of what really happened to Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) when he only seemed to die tragically and ironically at the end of Downton Abbey, Season III: he was actually resurrected as a killer zombie doomed to haunt small town America. It might sound silly, but it’s an idea no less silly than the entertaining but preposterous film, The Guest, in which Stevens stars as a man who isn’t who he says he is and is not. . . quite. . . all there.
Here’s the set-up. Stevens’ David arrives at the house of a lower-middle class family in some small midwestern town, and tells the mother, Laura (Sheila Kelley), that he’s a good friend of their recently deceased soldier son. David is earnest, intense, and almost achingly polite, and says he simply wants to pass on the last words his buddy left for his family. From the get go, there’s no question that something’s off in his presence here; eerie music plays before he arrives, the camera flashing on scenes of clean domesticity plus the carved pumpkins and other signs of that most dangerous of holidays, Halloween. His vague disorientation jostles uneasily against his seemingly single-minded desire to pay his respects to the family. Plus, the fellow has literally jogged miles from a bus stop to the house, and the fact that he’s perspiring not a whit when the mother of the family opens the door to him is probably meant as a creepy detail, though it also has the unfortunate nagging dissonance of a continuity fail.
So all the signs and portents point to a sort of psychological thriller, in which a family is seduced by a stranger and his promise to make things right. This is more or less what happens, with the young son Luke (Brendan Meyer) receiving invaluable advice on dealing with bullies, the daughter Anna (Maika Monroe) fighting against conflicted attraction toward and suspicion of the stranger, and the parents clearly taking comfort from this substitute son in their midst. But violence swirls around David; in no time at all, he beats up the bullies and roughs up a nasty boyfriend of Maika’s girlfriend with cold precision. Are we talking anger management issues, or something else? Well, the fact that David seems to lapse into a zombie-like catatonia when no one else is around would suggest the latter.
As long as ambiguity around the nature of David’s issues persists, that is, while this still seems to be a psychological thriller,The Guest has an off-kilter and unexpected quality to it: where is all this leading? Might there be some redemption in this strange man’s presence here? But a crucial corner is turned when we flash out of our setup and into a meeting at a Mysterious Corporation where every cliched possibility about David’s true identity comes rushing to the fore like a bad dream. I exaggerate only slightly: this sudden lurch in a direction that you could say was so expected as to be unexpected had me badly disoriented for a good few minutes, not out of a sense of its audaciousness but out of amazement that with one plot twist the filmmakers had frittered away whatever oddball originality had been conjured thus far.
Only, as events proceed to their now-predictably bloody conclusion, the movie does more or less stick to what turns out to have been its plan all along, to combine elements of black comedy and suspense in a combination that isn’t great but is a mixture all its own. But as it turns out that all the ambiguity in the first third of the movie was sort of a feint at something more profound, we’re left with a film that’s more concoction that solid construction. I’m all for tone changes in a movie, but as the final showdown is turned into a very ironic extended 1980’s music video, complete with a fog machine and a villain who just won’t stay dead, I’ve got to say that a sort of bold experimentation washes away any sense of coherence. It’s fun, but it’s also quite silly, and it’s miles away from the film’s earlier (false) promise.
I was unexpectedly reminded a few times of the slasher-thriller You’re Next, which I attributed to this being the most recent similar film I’d seen. Turns out it was directed by the same fellow, Adam Wingard. You’re Next also moves through an analagous tonal change, moving from a sort of mysterious, suspenseful, and weighty feel to an amusing and still suspenseful free-for-all in which its true nature is revealed. Thinking back on that film clarified for me how much The Guest feels less organic entirely, and more like a movie that’s trying to fake you out for its own sake. Let me put it this way: The Guest manages the trick of being both quite tense and pretty ridiculous, for which I want to give it its due.
If The Guest does work at some level, a great deal of credit must be given to its performers. In light of the film’s situation somewhere between credible thriller and cliched camp, and the fact that his character is ultimately some sort of incredible combination of psycho-schizo-yet-not-entirely-nutso, Stevens anchors things with an intense and skillful performance. A crude way of putting it is that good acting makes palatable otherwise incredible situations. And the children are both quite good - Meyers rolls with the punches that the plot requires of him, and Monroe (who I’m now really looking forward to seeing in It Follows) is a solid foil to Stevens’ presence; she’s got a combination of vulnerability, strength, and smarts that makes her an unexpected but credible match for David.