In the Flesh: The Guest

Never in my life have I heard sound design as bad as the Foley in The Guest, Adam Wingard’s not-quite-weird-enough thriller about a handsome, clean-cut young man who shows up on the doorstep of a family’s house and insinuates himself into their lives. There’s an audible “whoosh” like something out of old Hong Kong cinema when, during a bar fight, interloper David Collins turns toward a new threat. Every punch is accompanied by a sound like a wet towel snapping against bare skin as the camera whizzes and zooms around, drilling in on a broken leg, a grim expression, a stumbling football bro. None of this is inherently bad, of course. There are hundreds of films which deploy silly sound design to great effect — everything from Fargo’s glottal, gummy woodchipper roar to the whip-crack punches and kicks of Drunken Master — and one need look no further than Sam Raimi to know whether or not a wildly blitzing camera can elevate an action sequence.

The problem is that the absurd elements Wingard’s film are at odds with the rest of it, creating a jarring dissonance with its more thriller-esque sequences of eerie staring and calculated violence. You can tell he’s shooting for something akin to the zany gross-out John Carpenter flicks of the late 1980s, like the shaggy rough-and-tumble hijinks of Big Trouble in Little China and They Live, but his sets are anemic, his costuming and script beyond paper-thin, and his stabs at oddball dark comedy leaden. Dan Stevens is game enough as robotic supersoldier Collins, and in the film’s first act there are little flashes of boy scout sociopathy in his performance much more interesting than the eventual sneaky, smirking affect he manifests once revealed as a remorseless killer. A scene in which he hijacks a load of guns and kills the arms dealer to whom they belong lands so catastrophically flat that its big turn-cum-punchline feels like something out of a Grand Theft Auto cutscene.

At its core, The Guest’s real issue is a lack of conviction. It’s not cold or scary enough to be a decent thriller, not goofy or gonzo enough to be the kind of offbeat action flick it’s emulating. It commits halfway to multiple aesthetics and succeeds only in creating a bland, unappetizing mess as undercooked as its boilerplate story about supersoldiers and secret medical programs. None of its early emotional material pans out, its cast has nothing much to do but mark time, and its choreography is simultaneously incoherent and overly staid. In one scene we watch Kristen (Tabitha Shaun) checking David out appreciatively, but Wingard frames Stevens so that his whole chest is shadowy and he’s shorter than everyone else in the shot, his neck ropy and thin. It’s not scary, it’s not sexy, it’s just a guy standing in bad lighting. The whole movie’s trying to get one over on us by shouting “JOHN CARPENTER!” really loud and flashing some lights.