Cuckoo

Waltz N’ All

Cuckoo
Directed by Tilman Singer
Germany/USA 2024
Neon
UK Secret Preview Screening

I don’t usually go to secret cinema screenings, to be honest. Unless I’m pretty sure of what they might be. So the last one I went to was at a FrightFest where I’d correctly guessed it was a preview of the first Sin City movie, way back when. But, I’m on my holidays at the moment and so went to the Secret Screaming strand of Cineworld secret screenings this week, mostly because I was sure it would be the new Alien movie. I’m pleased to say I was very wrong about that and, instead, got a real treat.

Tilman Singer’s new movie Cuckoo, I have to say, had me right from the get go, with a credits sequence full of arguing, shouting and shadow play and just an incredible atmosphere all its own. This is the tale of Gretchen, played by Hunter Schafer, who is moving to a resort in Switzerland, surrounded by forests, to join her father, step mother and younger, mute stepsister after her mother’s death (I’m pretty sure it had an opening marker up for somewhere in Switzerland at any rate, although it appears to have been shot in Germany). When she is there she is given a summer job at the local hotel by the resort owner, played by Dan Stevens but, is told to not try and travel home alone after dark.

Okay, I’m not going to say too much more about the plot but I think I summed up my initial reaction to the film pretty well on Twitter last night. Cuckoo is like if a young David Lynch and a young David Cronenberg had decided to collaborate on a new movie project inspired by Hammer’s The Reptile. And it’s an absolutely unsettling and ravishing assault on the senses... if I can say that without it sounding too much of a cliché. It’s also very quirky.

The tone also really shouldn’t work too well because you’ve got some very different things going on here. For example, Hunter Schafer’s grief ridden, angsty teen is given a very naturalistic performance. Whereas Dan Stevens, who is pretty much the ‘human villain’ of the piece, is playing it like absolutely every kind of mad scientist role you could think of... coming across as a very fun and funny caricature of a villainous stereotype and, yeah, you can tell he’s having a really good time in this role. As was this audience member.

The supporting cast are all great too, especially the young girl played by Mila Lieu, who handles very well a problematic shading to an infant who is totally innocent but, who could also be a killer in the midst (not to give anything away here, I promise).

But the sound design and editing are the real stars of this film. There is a lot of screeching happening in the movie and, with the cinema sound system turned up unbearably loud for this screening (for some reason... luckily it enhanced this particular film inadvertently), it was almost headache inducing and absolutely effective. That’s okay, my favourite Godard movie, Weekend, with it’s blaring, incessant car horns is also headache inducing but, it’s still my favourite by that director. Here though, it’s also coupled with some wonderful shots of pulsing throats and, again without trying to give too much away... well, let’s say weaponised (or at the very least disarming) time loops triggered by the sound of the characters from which the title of the film takes its name.

Now, I have to say that the final act of the film... which is an extended chase/struggle to escape/shoot out etc... felt just a little too long. I think it could have been maybe just five minutes shorter but, honestly, I’m really not complaining. I think it worked well enough and the absolute artist who directed this certainly knows what he’s doing (so I’m guessing it was just as long as it needed to be to feel right, anyway).

And that about wraps it up for me on Cuckoo. I believe this film is getting a release in about ten days time and, if you are fan of the horror genre then you need to go and see this one. It’s very surreal, fast paced and sets up an atmosphere that the silliness of its central premise can just about contain. It would make a lovely double bill with the German horror film Schlaf (aka Sleep, reviewed by me here) and if you liked that one, the feel of the two movies is not dissimilar for their first reels, it has to be said. I hope this one gets a proper Blu Ray release soon... I even liked the needle dropped songs used on the soundtrack.

Abigail

Abi Ending

Abigail
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin
and Tyler Gillett
Ireland/USA/Canada 2024
Universal
UK Theatrical Print

Warning: Spoilers, unless you already saw the trailer.

Well, that’s about the fourth time in the space of as many weeks when I was thoroughly surprised with my cinema experience... in a good way (and that doesn’t happen a lot). So I saw the trailer for Abigail a month or so ago and, honestly, it almost put me off seeing the movie. However, I’ve been slowly getting back to the cinema post-covid and I thought I’d see this one. Even though said trailer was so clichéd and some of the ‘witty vampire dialogue’ was way older than most of the actors in this film. And it just looked like a terrible time at the cinema.

But it wasn’t. My expectations were very much exceeded when I started watching the film and got drawn into a kidnapping caper gone wrong, as various characters played by such great actors as Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, William Catlett, Kevin Durand and the late Angus Cloud, are sent to kidnap the titular little girl of the title, Abigail, played by Alisha Weir. Their safe house while they wait things out for their main man to come through with the ransom money is a luxury mansion but, suddenly, one of their team ends up decapitated. Is there someone in the house who wants them all dead? Probably because the security shutters all come down and they are locked in with the main threat of the film... also Abigail.

Okay. so, if you’ve seen the Abigail trailer then you’ll know that she is a young girl with a love of ballet who also happens to be a centuries old vampire gal. And her kidnappers, brought there by her own machinations, are her hobby food supply. So, as soon as everyone wakes up to the fact that she’s the main problem, it becomes a game of cat and mouse with everyone trying to kill the vampire before she eats them all.

Now, there is a cringy line of dialogue in the movie, which I wish they’d cut out of the film. I’m talking specifically about the line where Abigail says she likes to play with her food... honestly, how many times have you heard that one before? However, the whole movie is nicely put together and so I can forgive it a lot. They had me from the start with the use of Swan Lake on the soundtrack and, it was especially nice to hear it on the opening credits of a Universal movie again. It’s an obvious nod to the music used over the opening titles of the 1931 Todd Browning version of Dracula (reviewed by me here) and it kind of won me over from the start.

My only other problem with the film again stems from the trailer. For the first third of the movie, the directors play it like a straight crime drama, with the supernatural threat kept completely out of it (other than the obvious hint with the music... and Brian Tyler’s score for the movie is also fine, by the way). So the end of the first act twist is when Abigail herself is revealed to be their enemy, an inhuman vampire ready to quickly kill them all. So why reveal that in the trailer? I mean, I know they want their horror audience in but, they could have cut it in a way that the audience didn’t know that the little girl was anyone other than someone the kidnappers were trying to protect and stop from coming to harm. And it would have been that much stronger and much longer before any one saw it coming.

Instead, we get the full reveal in the trailers, long before the majority of people might have got there by themselves. I mean, one of the problems I had with Takashi Miike’s Audition in 1999 was that the trailer campaign didn’t try to hoodwink the audience into thinking it was a romantic comedy. The... erm... less than subtle change in tone was completely broadcast in the original trailers. And I understand why they did that but... um... yeah, it would have been stronger for a lot of people if the reveal wasn’t already embedded into the fabric of the trailer. I think a wiser, less blatant trailer here would have kept the audience guessing for a fair bit before Abigail’s true nature was finally revealed.

Having said that though, the terrible marketing doesn’t kill the film and, even though I knew it was a vampire flick from the start, I still had a surprisingly good time with it. Oh... and it’s quite gory compared to a lot of horror films (it’s an 18 certificate in the UK and you can kinda see why). When a vampire is killed in the movie, they basically explode in a shower of blood (just like they did in one of the greatest vampire movies ever made... Bliss... reviewed by me here). So, yeah, Abigail is a surprisingly gruesome flick but, that’s to its benefit, not its detriment and, well, their comes a time in the film when the clichés become homage... a legacy of the vampire films before them.

I could have done without them, mind you but, yeah, I was especially cheered up by the Swan Lake references, possibly designed to specifically appeal to some of the audience members who are maybe a bit long in the fang, for sure. It’s not the best horror film I’ve seen at the cinema in the last month but, well, it certainly beats a lot of what usually passes for horror at the cinema these days. So if you think you’re the target audience for this one, check it out for sure.

Colossal

Beware The Ids That March

Colossal
Spain/Canada 2016
Directed by Nacho Vigalondo 
UK cinema release print.

Okay... so what the heck happened to the publicity machine for Colossal? I literally was only aware that this movie even existed when one of my favourite composers, Bear McCreary, talked about doing the score for this on Twitter. After a while it’s finally arrived on UK shores and, mainly due to the poster design, I actually thought this movie was some kind of animated film. However, I looked at the trailer online, a few nights before I went to see it and was absolutely enthralled by what looked like a comedy starring Ann Hathaway who has somehow become inextricably linked to a giant monster which is stomping Seoul.

Which is pretty much what it is...

Or should I say... what it starts out as, at least. One of the things the trailer is doing, however, is masking that the film suddenly ‘does a Gremlins’ and takes an unexpected left turn about two thirds of the way through the movie... once the rules of the monster/human link have been established in some fairly funny and, surprisingly, sometimes moving moments in the film. This is such a good movie on pretty much every level, to be honest (although I know it has its detractors too).

Anne Hathaway is absolutely excellent in this and also has one of the Executive Producer credits here. I’ve not actually seen her in many movies but I think she’s actually got a certain screen presence which goes far above and beyond her abilities as an actress. She can screw her face up into various expressions which are almost larger than life, stage acting style short-hand to convey emotion but... it really doesn’t look out of place on film, somehow, the way she does it and she manages to do so much with it, so naturally, that she brings a lot to the table. My eyes were pretty much on her, more so than any kaiju eiga inspired scenes in the film. She is joined by people like the always watchable Dan Stevens, as her ex-boyfriend who kicks her out at the start of the movie and Jason Sudeikis, who actually does a really interesting and subtle performance, especially in terms of bringing a certain amount of stealth character establishment in the first two thirds of the film. I honestly did not see the character arc for him coming in terms of his specific personality so... yeah, longtime readers of this site will know that I love the few rare films that can surprise me and this one surprised me no end as it sauntered to it’s... very satisfying ending.

So, yeah, all the acting is great.

What’s also great in this, asides from Mr. McCreary’s incredible and appropriate score for the film (yeah, you can bet that CD is already on order... can’t wait to hear it as a stand alone listen) is some of the incredibly interesting shot designs. This director actually does some interesting stuff with the character which was a pure joy to watch.

For instance, lets talk about the way a director might focus on a character.

Back in the days before a director could ‘zoom in’ effectively on someone, you had directors like Sergei Eisenstein. He would show a shot of, say, a crowd and then focus on individuals in that crowd for an emotional interaction with the audience. However, what he would do, possibly due to technical limitations of the equipment at the time he was making movies like Battleship Potemkin, Oktober or Strike, would be to cut to a close up of the actor or actress in question. However... and this works at almost a subconscious level the first time you see one of his movies, he shoots the actor against a different background without any distractions to the foreground... like a somehow more staged or hyper-real version of the original shot. You have a look sometime and you might see that not everything in those shots match. In Eisenstein’s case, he didn’t use actors but people who naturally looked like the kinds of stereotypes he wanted to convey to use in this manner and this kind of practice in Soviet Cinema of the time was known as typeage.

Well, director Nacho Vigalondo doesn’t do anything quite like that here but he does use the camera in some nice and unexpected ways to pull the focus onto the actors involved in the movie when a character, usually Ann Hathaway, needs to come into some kind of snap focus so the audience can catch everything and sympathise, or empathise, with her plight.

For instance, after a pre-credits sequence establishing the first appearance of the colossal monster 25 years prior to the main body of the film, we return to present day with Hathaway’s character Gloria being kicked out of her flat by her boyfriend because of her constant and repetitive bad behaviour... specifically because of her drinking problem. After he leaves her in his flat to go to work, a load of people start filling the room, who Gloria has waiting in the wings to resume the partying once her boyfriend has left for his office for the day. As people file in behind her we see sitting about two thirds of the way to the right of the screen, sitting at a table with shock on her face as she looks towards the camera. Behind her we have two large windows filling most of the screen with the single, upright vertical between the windows splitting the screen in half. The director slyly and casually moves the camera around to the right so Gloria moves to the left in relation to the window until it’s she, herself, who becomes the vertical split in the centre of the screen... thus highlighting her character in perfect symmetry as we concentrate on her features more. And it’s brilliant. I loved it and felt like clapping in the cinema.

Another thing he does, later, to bring the symbiotic link between her and the main monster of the film home on a visual level, is to have her standing in front of a giant television with her back to us as she watches news footage of the monster’s ‘rampage’ from the night before. Previously we had seen her put one hand up to test her hypothesis that there is an actual link between her and the creature, followed by swinging both arms up to the side as part of a series of gestures to reveal the truth of her plight. As she watches the playback of the monster, we see the back of the top half of Gloria’s body, with her hands by her side, in the centre of the shot, masking the creature on the TV screen. As the creature throws its arms up and to the side, we are given a visual metaphor of the link as the creature’s televised arms become the visual surrogate for Gloria herself, completing her body in a way that is one of the truly unique ways that film can make comparisons as part of a narrative flow. It’s a less subtle but really great moment in the film and, again, I wanted to throw my own arms up to congratulate the director here. This stuff was incredible.

As the film reaches the last third of the running time, the comedy is dropped and, in addition to the drinking issues already highlighted, it takes another serious social issue and tackles it head on in a way that, if this wasn’t a science fiction story, it wouldn’t be able to do in the unique way it does it here. I’m not going to spoil this thing for you but I will say that if you saw the trailer and are expecting an out and out comedy... think again. This film gets kind of ugly later in a way that you probably wont see coming and some of the character performances in this part get almost too hard to watch.

Another great strength of this film is, just like the majority of modern, post 1969 zombie movies, the writer doesn’t really bother to explain just why there’s a giant monster that is inexplicably linked to Gloria. Sure it gives a kind of half hearted ‘origin’ scene which it works it’s way up to in flashback but this in no way explains just what the heck is going on and it’s seen in fierce juxtaposition with a revelatory confirmation of the nature of one of the other characters in the film so much so that, by this point, it really doesn’t matter anymore. The movie is no longer about the ‘how’ but about the ‘why’ and how Gloria is going to be able to fix things in her life (and also save gazillions of people).

And that’s all I’m going to say here about this movie because it’s frankly awesome. Yes, I’m sure the social issues it targets are crudely handled in terms of the 'final solution' of a certain problem in the film and I’m sure it’s all done in an over-the-top manner but, you know, sometimes these issues are something you need to show in a simplistic, ‘beat you over the head with it’ form to provoke thought in an audience once the movie is finished. I don’t know enough about the specific issues it takes on to be able to say whether it hits the right points or not but at least it got me contemplating them for a minute or two. Which is no bad thing, I guess.

If you haven’t already guessed it, Colossal is a solid recommend from me. If you are thinking of seeing it, don’t go expecting a horror movie or even a comedy movie, although there are some good laughs to be had in the earlier parts of the movie. Catch this one at the cinema before it’s too late because it is quite original, in some ways, even if it’s deliberately using genre tropes to reach its end game. A lot of fun and it also makes you pause and think. Cinema at its very best.

A Walk Among The Tombstones

Tomb It May Concern

A Walk Among The Tombstones
2014  USA
Directed by Scott Frank
UK cinema release print.

I’ve not seen Eight Million Ways To Die but it’s probably worth mentioning that here because it’s a film which stars Jeff Bridges playing the same character, Matthew Scudder, that Liam Neeson plays in A Walk Among The Tombstones. Nor have I read the 18 books published by Lawrence Block about the adventures of the character on which each of those two films is based... A Walk Among The Tombstones being the tenth in the series. So I guess what I’m saying here is that I can’t pitch this review in the context of any past experience of the character in any previous media incarnations. So as far as it’s success as a faithful adaptation goes... I can’t tell you.

What I can do, however, is point out to you that this is one of the best film noir style thrillers I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not exactly a police procedural movie as such because, certainly, the main character Matthew Scudder, played quite brilliantly and believably by Liam Neeson as a recovered alcoholic, is an ex-cop who now works as an unlicensed “private” detective... but it certainly uses many of the investigative methods, or at least the cinematic shorthand for them, used by both policiers and various other private detective films throughout the years.

When I say it’s a modern film noir I’m not being creative with my words either. This is almost a text book classic noir film with many, if not all, of the main ingredients of the classic noir thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s. In terms of the crisp quality of the cinematography and general mise en scene as well as the grimy, grey moral territory that’s often best rendered through a curiously chiaroscuro point of view, allowing the audience to stand in moral judgement of the dilemmas faced by the anti-heroes of such tales.

The plot concerns one of the big noir themes used almost to oblivion but re-appropriated very well for a film with this kind of tone... revenge.

Liam Neeson’s character is hired by a drug dealer because he believes he has a particular set of skills needed to find the people who kidnapped the drug dealer’s wife, ransomed her for a large sum of money and then chopped her up into little pieces after he’d paid them off. There is no shilly shallying around with motivations here... the dealer makes it clear that he intends to kill them. This makes it a little harder for Neeson’s character to take on the job but some cinematic sleight of hand which is presented to the audience as a kind of male bonding follow up scene to his first interview with the husband is all that’s needed to justify why the less morally flexible (than he used to be) Matthew Scudder takes on the job in the first place.

One of the main ingredients of the standard film noir, the femme fatale or presence of a strong female character in the plot, is curiously absent in this movie. There is really no single female lead in this film, only a few supporting female characters. However, it’s tellingly noirish, I think, that the women and girls in this film are mostly seen as the motivations for the actions of the majority of the male protagonists and antagonists here. If you were feeling mean spirited about it I guess you could say that all the female figures in this movie are reduced to catalysts and obsessions for the men to act out their revenge fantasies. However, the other way to look at it is that the female presence, in a movie mostly devoid of women, is actually very strong and certainly, the way one of those women is viewed in this movie, that of the drug dealer’s wife Carrie, is very much an echo of the way a female presence can be used in a classic film noir.

To explain that last comment, Carrie’s painting on her husbands wall serves as a very visual and constant reminder reminder (the camera loves it) of the woman he has lost and is consequently so obsessed with. His brother, also, has various sketches, paintings and studies of her on his wall and the character almost comes to life in a way just from her painting. This is very similar to the way the portrait of Gene Tierney’s character Laura is used in the first half of the movie Laura, in this respect, although that’s probably all I want to say about that particular classic noir in case you’ve not seen it and I give too much away. Needless to say, there was something I was expecting to happen in A Walk Among The Tombstones because I’d made that connection while watching it, which doesn’t actually take place, I’m happy to say.

What we do get in this film, however, is a heck of a lot of male bonding. There’s even a young teenage character who Scudder, almost accidentally, takes on as an assistant who serves both that function and, surely not coincidentally, acts as a kind of redemption fulfilment figure for Scudder due to certain aspects of a shoot out that went wrong in Scudder’s past.

We see this shoot out at the start of the movie, right after a scene which is used to establish Neeson’s character as someone who is initially unlikeable. This shoot out is probably the most kinetic and frenetically edited sequence in the whole movie and, when we revisit the scene later to bring new information to it which wasn’t revealed at the opening of the piece, it’s then that we see why the young teenage character, TJ, has been introduced into the plot line.

The rest of the movie, including the revisited opening chase and shoot sequence, is shot and cut in a much more sedate manner which really allows the shots to breathe and the actors to perform in either long static shots or slow, languorous camera pans etc. The film never gets boring though and concentrates and distills your attention to the emotional heart of the story so that the revenge motif and the moral dilemmas faced by many of the characters never once seem false or fake. You believe in the people in this and you know something bad is going to happen to a lot of them here before the film resolves itself in a very curious couple of ending shots which are, in some ways, very brave of the film-makers.

It’s also got a very nice score by a guy called Carlos Rafael Rivera that is totally appropriate, never overpowers the dialogue or action, but still maintains a strong melodic presence throughout the whole of the picture. I’m guessing it works okay as a stand alone listen too so that’s a reminder to myself right there to go and order the CD after I finish writing this. The score really helps too, in a shoot out sequence at the end that is a stop and start counterpoint to some of the “steps” of a recovering alcoholic, acting as a kind of audio glue. At least I think it was used in that sequence... I’ll need to watch it again. I think this particular sequence was almost a misstep from the director but, since there’s a couple of extended denouement scenes at the finish of the movie, it didn’t completely spoil the tone of the rest of the film for me and I’ll cut them some slack for that. For all I know they deliberately needed to slow the sequence down for some reason, in the final cut, and I can appreciate the metaphor as it’s presented, at least.

Not much else to say about this one. If you like strong, gritty, noirish movies with characters you can believe in and a high level of both emotional and physical violence at certain points then you can’t really go wrong with A Walk Among The Tombstones. Neeson’s performance is superb, as you would expect from an actor of his calibre, but so is everyone else in this and the dialogue is pitch perfect. Seriously go out and see this dark little thriller while it’s still showing.

The Guest

Guest In Peace

The Guest
2014  USA
Directed by Adam Wingard
UK cinema release print.

I saw the trailer to this movie in cinemas a few weeks ago and remember being curious as to whether the title character of this movie was supposed to be a hero or a villain... or something in between an anti-hero and a villain... but decidedly unintrigued enough to bother finding out either way. It was not a movie I’d planned on seeing.

However, fate had other things in store for me as I was going to work one day and I was passed by a red, double decker bus stopping opposite where I was awaiting my similar ride into work. The bus side advert was a poster design for The Guest and, it has to be said, this was instantly appealing. It looked like someone with the psychedelic sensibility of a budding Mario Bava had got the purple paint out and swirled it around and used it as window dressing for a completely different movie to the one I had been expecting from the trailer. This poster was beautiful and I decided then and there that any director or studio who had let this brilliant throwback design out of the gate to sell their movie deserved my backside on a seat in front of their work at the very least. Some good “tweet of mouth” on the internet over the next few days solidified that idea for me.

Now, I’ve not had great times with the director, Adam Wingard, just lately from my experience of his framing film for V/H/S (review will be coming either September or October), although his short for the original The ABCs Of Death was quite cute (again, review to follow). I might have decided against going to see it if I’d have taken careful note of the director’s name and all I can say about that is... thank goodness I didn’t take note of the director’s name.

Adam Wingard’s The Guest is a really nice little movie which has a kind of upending of audience expectations of the characters they are watching. Or maybe upending is the wrong word because, frankly, you are on your guard right from the word go that not all is what it seems and then, rather than overturn your perception of events just the once, the director kind of plays with the tropes of what is, essentially, the set up of an old style American Western and keeps the audience guessing as to both the motivations and integrity of the character all the way through.

And it’s quite a neat trick to do too because those two qualities, which are usually perceived as being mutually inclusive good things in a character, are what gives this movie its edge and they actually play against each other to get to a point where you, the audience, have to make your own judgement call on both the intentions of David, played very impressively by Dan Stevens, and the ultimate consequences of the collateral damage in the movie by that character’s direct actions.

The basic set up is an ex-soldier returning from service in the Middle East, who goes to keep an eye on/help the family of his best mate over there, who was recently deceased in service. He stays on at their house for a few days and slowly goes about fixing, in his unique way, the various problems of the remaining members of his friend’s immediate family... the mother, the father, the other son and the daughter. But there are signs, mostly conveyed through Dan Stevens' reflective facial expressions and, sometimes less than subtlely, with a sinister barrage of musical sting, that all is not right behind the brain of The Guest. 

In a way, it’s kinds like Shane filtered through the government shadow group paranoia of something like The Bourne Identity and then, when it gets to the last act, just going off the rails a bit. To say more would be to give away the main hook of watching the movie and I really do want to make this review as “spoiler free” as I can. What I will say though is, it’s not a cut and dried situation and I’d hazard a guess that if you asked a hundred people who had just watched the movie whether or not the title character was a hero or a villain, you’d probably have something like a quarter to a third of them answering in direct opposition to the remaining percentage of the sample.

The film seems quite low budget. It’s not wall to wall action, which is maybe what an audience may expect form the trailer but which is, frankly, all the better for not being that kind of Hollywood style concoction. And it also turns out that Wingard and the writer, Simon Barrett, have that sense of timing that a lot of the current talent in big budget action movie making has kind of lost... the ability to pace the movie and lead up to the set action pieces with a certain amount of the tension/release/build and then build some more aspect which make certain films with an action/thriller prospect in them so good to watch when they combine all the ingredients in the right way. Simon Barret obviously recognises just what the ingredients should be here and Adam Wingard, it turns out, is a remarkably good cook with this kind of recipe.

The other ingredients are a cast who all know their game very well and play their, sometimes stereotypical characters, with the kind of enthusiasm for the “quick character sketch” that helps you both understand the characters and sympathise with (or hate) them speedily. Which is handy in a movie like this. There’s also a nice score which mixes electronica with the occasional pop song (less keen on the songs but they certainly aren’t inappropriate) and helps heighten the tension and action expectations in key areas of the movie... and, yes, I am annoyed I couldn’t find a CD release of it on Amazon.

My one slight criticism is the gun selling sequence in the film... which has very minor shades of Taxi Driver and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly in it and which, for me, becomes the one on-screen sequence which doesn’t quite glue together with the rest of the narrative in terms of a central character who wants to never be a blip on anyone’s radar. It does, however, get the story chugging into high gear for the last third of the movie and there could be justification for this if we knew a little more about the background of the character than the “absolutely essential minimum” that we are given here (which means that it can all be further explored should any sequel, arise, of course).

And that’s about as far as I’m prepared to go in terms of talking about The Guest if I want to keep it spoiler free. The film will probably be seen as a bit of a genre bender for some audience members and there will probably be another section of the audience who won’t see it like that at all... which is pretty good because it gets people talking and exploring the ideas presented here, the chief one for me being the military mind of doing what you are told you are supposed to be doing in any given situation as opposed to making moral judgements on a set of situations... which is not something that’s explored in movies often enough, it seems to me.

So, yeah, The Guest. If you like slow burn thriller and/or early American Westerns and want a good night out at the movies with a low budget entertainment that resembles those rare times when you rented a “straight to VHS” tape in the 1980s and actually discovered a bona fide, underrated classic as opposed to the usual tape fodder you would get in your local off licence or newsagent, then The Guest is definitely something you should consider inviting into your life for a couple of hours. It’s good fun.