
Victoria
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
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"The Guest" announces its intentions and style in the short opening
sequence. There's a close-up of a guy, shot from behind, running down an
empty road through a desert. He's wearing heavy military-style boots.
We don't see his face. Suddenly, with a blast of terrifying music, the
title screen comes, huge purple letters on a black background. The next
shot, accompanied by another alarming blare of scary music, shows a
horrifying-looking scarecrow, lording it over the desert landscape. In
three shots, director Adam Wingard announces what "The Guest" will be
all about, tells us what the film is. The opening
locates us easily and confidently in space, time, mood, and genre. "The
Guest" delivers on that initial promise.
David ("Downton Abbey"'s Dan Stevens) shows up unexpectedly on the
doorstep of the Peterson family, made up of parents (Sheila Kelley and
Leland Orser), a teenage daughter named Anna (Maika Monroe in a
fantastic performance) and grade-school-age son Luke (Brendan Meyer).
David announces himself at the door, quietly and politely, with his
gentle Kentucky accent, as a friend of their eldest son who had been
killed in combat. The Petersons, still reeling from grief, let the
stranger in. He is intense, but submissive, speaking quietly to each
family member, providing them with positive memories of their fallen
son, and within 24 hours he has been invited to move into the dead son's
old room.
On the surface, David presents himself as an old-fashioned guy, with good
manners, eager to make himself useful to the grieving family. It is the
least he can do for his dead friend. He becomes a protector to young
Luke against the bullies at the boy's school, and Anna, fighting with her
own suspicions about this new "guest," can't help but take notice of the
guy's blazing baby-blues and phenomenal body, glimpsed wrapped in a
towel in the hallway after his shower.
The audience can sense immediately that David is not the lost lamb he
pretends to be; the opening sequence alone has already clued us in. But
"The Guest" takes its time revealing what is really going on, and has a
lot of fun in that slow reveal process.
Director Wingard and his regular screenwriter collaborator Simon Barrett
are interested in genre mash-ups and the dramatic possibilities of
comedy-horror, as evidenced by their previous full-length feature
"You're Next." "The Guest" goes even further in that direction. The
music (by Steve Moore) suddenly blasts throughout, with moments of
pulsing techno unease, as Anna, crouched in her bedroom decorated with
Goth-Girl skull-and-crossbones, desperately tries to figure out more
about the hot interloper, now sleeping in the room next door.
Thomas Hammock's production design adds to the camp flavor of "The
Guest", sometimes tipping over into blatant parody. The film takes place
in the weeks leading up to Halloween, and therefore the screen is
filled with Halloween decorations crowding in on every single scene from
the walls, the ceilings, the counter-tops. Even in quiet safe moments
sitting around the kitchen table, sharing tender memories, the
characters are leered at on all sides by jack-o-lanterns and black cats
and horrified ghosts. There's even a great scene in a Hall-of-Mirrors
Haunted House maze, echoing with disorienting demonic laughter. The mood
is both legitimately terrifying and hilarious.
The second half of the film careens headlong into glorious paranoia and
conspiracy-theory, reminiscent of 1970s political thrillers, involving
gleaming board-rooms populated by stone-faced military brass, top-secret
briefcases, and world-class weaponry that even the military wouldn't
admit to developing. David's strangeness is apparent from the get-go,
but it's just the tip of the iceberg.
None of this would work without Dan Stevens' fascinating and compelling
presence at the center. When he left "Downton Abbey," after becoming an
old-school heartthrob as Matthew Crawley, the reluctant heir to the
great house, fans of the show howled in protest. Here, he shows his
versatility, something he had been itching to do during his years on
"Downton Abbey." Stevens' accent is seamless, without even a hint of his
British origins, and he brings a gentleness and openness to the
character that manages to seem extremely "off," as well as a truly
sinister undercurrent, something dead-eyed and remote.
Wingard and Barrett have a perfect eye and ear for this type of
material. They have fun with their influences, paying homage to John
Carpenter and others. They're not afraid to be silly and bold. "The Guest" could
have drowned in top-heavy seriousness, while trying to make some
political point. But it's really not serious at all. That's a
compliment.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
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