Past Misdeeds: The Guest (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

The Peterson family – mother Laura (Sheila Kelley), father Spencer (Leland Orser), nearly of age daughter (who’d be of age for nearly three years in my country, and legally drinking beer for nearly five) Anna (Maika Monroe) and teenage son Luke (Brendan Meyer) – are still grieving for the death of their eldest son in combat in one of America’s recent wars. One day, a stranger calling himself David (Dan Stevens) shows up at their door, introducing himself as a war buddy of the son come to pay his respects and give them a final message of love from him.

David might feel just a little bit off, but he’s also charming, attractive, attentive and seems honestly interested in each family member and their respective problems, calming the mother, buddying up to the father, half-charming the more sceptical Anna, and helping Luke out with his bully problems. Quickly, a short stay for a night or two turns into an unspoken and indefinite agreement about his staying on as a live-in family friend. However, further developments might just reveal that David’s more than he pretends to be, and perhaps even a danger to everyone he comes into contact with, in particular those people towards whom he has good intentions.

After my general dislike for You’re Next and my honest puzzlement about the critical cheering – at least in horror circles – Adam Wingard’s film got where less smug movies suffered a polite shrug, I did not expect anything much to my tastes going into his next film The Guest. What I got, however, is a truly excellent film that not just avoids nearly everything I found problematic or pretty damn annoying about its predecessor but turns it around and into an asset.

So Wingard still demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge of genre film history, but where demonstrating it felt like a pointless, and rather smug, gesture to me in You’re Next (So you’ve seen a lot of movies? So have I. So what?), The Guest seems to be all about actually learning from the movies that came before and then applying that knowledge to improve the film at hand and turn it into a more effective piece and telling its story better. Thus making an understanding of early John Carpenter, the same neon 80s aesthetic that dominated Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, and all those thrillers about mentally ill people worming themselves into bourgeois families, a natural part of the film’s language.

While Wingard keeps being interested in a subversion of genre expectations, his approach here goes far beyond “ironic” quotes or making a handful of obvious changes to the formula that play better with an contemporary audience, leaving The Guest not as a film about older movies (or even a critique of them) but a thing standing on its own that organically uses those techniques and effects that will best serve its purpose to tell a story of its own. A story I have consciously been quite vague about here because I don’t want to rob anyone of the experience of just watching this particular film for the first time without much more than the expectations you’ll have about a genre film with its particular set-up. Now, fortunately, this does not mean The Guest is a film that’s all about one big plot twist, but only that all its little twists and turns are perfectly worth experiencing on one’s own for the first time. All too often, a film having plot twists means it will make grand, dramatic gestures about developments that have little logical or thematic connection to what came before in a story, whereas here, these things all feel like natural developments and are perfectly in the flow of what came before.

It’s this flow, an organic feel, that impresses me particularly about The Guest, a feeling that each single element in plot, design, direction and acting truly feeds into the film as a whole, leaving one with the feeling of having watched something of perfect inner logic, with no single element that could disabuse one of that notion hogging the spotlight for a second too long. So this is a film with a wonderful cast – Monroe, Stevens and Meyer are particular high points – tight direction, often very inventive camera work and editing, as well as a script that is much cleverer than it pretends to be, where again all these single elements just feed into the movie as a whole. It is quite difficult to single out any one of these elements as particularly remarkable, not because of their quality or lack of such but because the film is so much of one piece, looking at the single parts it is made off seems to be completely beside the point, unless you have an academic interest in talking about film.


Of course, in theory, that’s how all films are supposed to work. However films where things come together quite this way and that still make it look easy and natural, without artifice exactly thanks to their high degree of artistry (which is by nature artificiality) aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Again, the early John Carpenter comes to my mind the most, and that’s really how The Guest feels to me: a movie so great it deserves comparison to the best.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following the events of the last John Wick, our hero, sensitive mass murderer John Wick (Keanu Reeves, upon whose greatness as a person I am now apparently bound by law to sing an ode, even though he’s still not much of an actor, which seems to be rather more relevant to me when talking about him, you know, acting) is on the run, hunted by the same goofy cabal/cult running the international underworld he murdered oh so many people for. If the end of the second John Wick suggested to you that John has a plan to somehow fight back against The High Table, during the course of the film you’ll learn that he really hasn’t one apart from seeking the overlord of his now-enemies to…beg him to take him back in. Whoa.

On the plus side, on his way to there (and back again), dear John is meeting up with various old and new acquaintances (among them Halle Berry doing quite a bit of dog-based gun fu) and killing a whole lot of people in front of very sexy looking backgrounds.

So yeah, if you expected the actual story of Chad Stahelski’s third John Wick movie to go anywhere, you might very well be disappointed on finding the whole plot of this third film could very well have been squeezed into the first half hour of the fourth John Wick film, for all the way it moves the not-so epic story forward. It sure doesn’t help the plot that John is quite so much of a one-trick pony, never actually learning anything, never really changing, and so when he actually tries something different, he seems to make his new choices at random. People (and I am sometimes one of them) make fun of automatic Hollywood character arcs often enough, but for John Wick as a character, that would be an actual improvement.

However, while not much of actual import happens (John killing hordes of people is by now such a given pretending it might mean anything is preposterous), the film goes further in its direct predecessor’s attempts at building a cartoonishly-goofy yet also irresistibly baroque world made out of conspiracy theory, comic book ideas about organized crime that make the Kingpin’s organization seem plausible in comparison, and often eye-popping aesthetics. I do sometimes wish the film would use this world for more than creating mere backgrounds for its fights as if it were a level-bound videogame, but them’s the breaks.

Speaking of fights, the action sequences are of course the actual reason for the movie to exist, and for the most part, they do not disappoint, the series by now having progressed to a stage where animal-loving John inducing a horse to back-kick his enemies to death seems perfectly logical for the world it takes place in. It’s obviously silly as hell – I’m expecting he’s going to throw adorable killer puppies at his enemies in the next film – but presented with so much verve – often style, too – that it’s pretty difficult to not be on board with this sort of thing. Also damn great are Halle Berry’s dog kennel fighting style, and all kinds of absurd flourishes in nearly every action scene. The least impressive of them is probably the grand finale that sees John fight against a scenery-chewing Mark Dacascos, which depends a bit too much on an audience not noticing how awkward and stiff Reeves looks when compared to his sparring partner. But hey, at least John has been shot, beaten and cut so much at this stage, his slowing down and doing martial arts like Keanu Reeves does make some sense.


So, while John Wick 3: Electric Boogaloo is not quite as great fun as the second film, it’s also not the annoying waste of time the first one was, and still a very entertaining bit of movie videogame violence. Perhaps the fourth John Wick film will even get around to having a plot?

Faults (2014)

Going by the fashion, the film takes place at the end of the 70s, beginning 80s, though one could imagine the sort of mildly sleazy decay of the interior decoration existing for quite a bit longer than that in the right/wrong place. Some time ago, Ansel Roth (Leland Orser) was a successful cult expert and deprogrammer, with his own TV show as well as a successful book, and if you don’t think that makes him sound like a sleazy kind of guy taking advantage of the people he is supposedly helping? He surely was, and you’re a much more optimistic person than I, imaginary reader.

After a catastrophic failure, Ansel’s life went down the crapper. He lost his show, his wife, his money, and his self respect. A second, self-published book nobody wants to buy has left him with debts to his dubious agent (Jon Gries). Ansel’s still trying to hawk the book by holding seminars in less than respectable hotels for the excellent price of a bed and a meal, but his agent’s getting antsy about getting his money back, sending a very threatening man (Lance Reddick) to put the fear into him.

So, despite his understandable and well founded reluctance to do this sort of thing ever again, Ansel agrees when a middle-aged couple (Chris Ellis and Beth Grant) ask him to kidnap and deprogram their daughter Claire (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who is involved in a cult known under the catchy name of Faults. Given Ansel’s own mental state, outside influences, and certain things he doesn’t know about, the project doesn’t go well, and it becomes ever more difficult to decide who is (de)programming whom.

The plot synopsis doesn’t really show how deeply strange – or truly Weird – writer/director Riley Stearns’s (who also just happens to be the husband of Mary Elizabeth Winstead, which is the sort of nepotism I can really get behind if it leads to films like this) uncategorizable Faults is. There’s that special sort of clever artificiality surrounding much of the production – the early 80s interior design, the smuttiness of the places, even the acting – that on first contact looks like naturalism but, once one looks at it closer, begins to feel slightly off, even absurd. It becomes increasingly difficult to decide what here is to be treated at face value; what as irony, and what as metaphor, the film becoming a world where all, any, or none of these things might be true about any given element. Even the early, clearly darkly comedic or absurd scenes in the film that establish how deeply fucked up Ansel’s existence is look different in hindsight – there’s sadness and a vague threat in there too, if you look at them from a different angle, and shifting perspectives and transforming roles are quite important in Faults.

One might be tempted to call this approach to movie reality Lynchian, if that weren’t by now a cliché in itself when not used to describe the actual works of David Lynch, and if it didn’t suggest a film that tries (and fails) to copy Lynch, when the film at hand is in fact very much something with a personality and a style all its own. Stearns direction is calm and assured, with just the right amount of surrealism when it is needed, and a wonderful (or horrifying, depending on one’s tastes) dead pan way of showing the strange and the difficult to explain.

I have read complaints the plot of the film is rather predictable but I think this only applies if you’re looking at it in its most basic form. Indeed, the general direction the film is going to take is quite clear early on, but this really isn’t a film that wants to be a twisty thriller, and the way the film gets where it ends up and what is shows in between is clearly more important to it than being surprising. And, to be honest, when it comes to the strange, telling, and very possibly metaphorical detail, Faults is often very surprising, if not necessarily easy to grasp. Which is not a problem for me in movies in general, and most certainly not in one that is quite this hypnotic in its individual strangeness and strangenesses.

Faults is a also a wonderfully acted movie with a fine cast even in the more minor roles, and just great performances by Orser - who makes someone who isn’t exactly easy to like relatable without turning him into someone clearly made to be relatable - and Winstead - who goes from fragile to enigmatic to just plain creepy and back again with an ease and a naturalness that is a bit disturbing.

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On ExB: The Guest (2014)

Given how little I enjoyed Adam Wingard’s You’re Next, I didn’t expect anything from his next movie.

What I got was a film I have a hard time not calling a masterpiece, so please follow this handy link to my gushing about it over at the venerable Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,thriller,adam wingard,dan stevens,maika monroe,brendan meyer,lance reddick,other places