So it’s been a while since we last watched a horror movie. This one was added to our usual list because it got some decent comments on Broken Forum and a quick check confirmed that it has a rating of over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’d never watched anything by director Adam Wingard but he appears to have a decent body of work. So it can’t be that bad, right?

The movie starts decently enough with the atmosphere and the font of the title card evoking an old style horror movie while its setting and characters are thoroughly modern. The family of a soldier who died in action in Afghanistan receives an unexpected guest one day. David Collins claims to be have been a friend and that he had promised his fellow soldier that he would make sure that his family was alright. He manages to win over the initially skeptical members of the family one by one with his friendliness and competence who invite him to stay until he gets back on his feet. But as usual in such films, David hides a dark secret and things go badly for the family as it is slowly revealed.

One reason why this film initially looked promising to me was that it so resembled Park Chan-wook’s Stoker, a film that I loved. In fact, I can’t believe that Dan Stevens, who played David Collins, wasn’t consciously channeling Matthew Goode’s performance, right down to the odd light in their eyes. Unfortunately it turns out this resemblance is only superficial as The Guest has no depth at all and rapidly goes off the rails when things go bad. It doesn’t try for any sort of plausibility at all. The family never asks David about his own family or about his experiences with their son. The reaction of the son, being the first person to realize how much of a psychopath David is, comes across as a weird what-the-fuck moment however much he hero-worships David as the ideal big brother.

I was actually bemused at first at how the film uses a bait-and-switch trick to confuse audiences about its genre. As I’ve mentioned, it starts like a horror movie with a hint of the supernatural but then turns into an action movie. But when it turned into a teenage slasher movie towards the end, I realized that this is less a director deliberately playing with genre tropes and more a director who has no idea what he is doing. At one point, it is hinted that the government authorities are as evil as David is, but that plot hook is left hanging and abruptly abandoned. Wingard is even embarrassingly bad at directing those different genres. The gunfights are limp and unexciting, with David winning only because the posse of hired guns are so incompetent. The ending is a straightforward regurgitation of slasher tropes including a final girl, the villain who seems to die but then seems to come back and so forth.

The most frustrating thing is that there are innumerable ways in which this could have gone right. They could have played up David as a more sympathetic character, someone who genuinely wants to help the family but always does so in the most violent manner possible. They could have gone with David being a total psychopath but showed that the government is even worse than he is, being willing to destroy the whole town just to get him for example to really mess with audience expectations. Or as one Broken Forum poster wrote, they could have used it as a commentary on what happens to super-soldiers who don’t have anyone to kill once they come back home. But the route they actually picked is the most conventional and boring one possible.

So yeah, this is a bad movie that doesn’t have any redeeming value at all and I’m sorry to have picked it to watch. But you know what, it’s still not as awful as Godzilla was due to its pretentiousness and waste of valuable talent.