Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barretts follow up to their 2013 film Youre Next is a strange movie, and not just because its plot happens to center around a mysterious, creepily seductive soldier returning home from the war in Afghanistan to pay his respects to the family of one of his fallen squad-mates. No, the weirdest thing about the movie is just how insanely different a story it ends up being from what the initial premise would indicate, and not necessarily in a good way. With a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, The Guest received no shortage of acclaim. Yet while the film is unquestionably stylish, and features a unsettling turn by Dan Stevens as the films titular character, its also surprisingly messy and scatterbrained, plot-wise, to the point where comprehension takes a backseat to cheap theatrics and all around chaos simply for the sake of all around chaos. While some might argue that said broadness is the whole point of the movie - that in embracing so many distinctive narrative avenues, Wingard and Barrett are celebrating the horror genres innate versatility - it doesnt change the fact that The Guest, judged purely on its own terms, is decidedly lacking when it comes to telling a cohesive and satisfying story, working better as a feature-length WTF machine than as an actual, fully formed cinematic experience.
