“Astonishingly sharp first feature”

In ideal circumstances, celebrations of touchstone events should be some of the happiest and most unforgettable moments in a family’s collective journey. But in families where the possible appearance of one of its black sheep looms, the joy and excitement in preparing for what could be a core memory can come hand in hand with a dilemma. Is it cruel to exclude someone for the possibility of an outburst of behavior that they can’t fully be held accountable for? Or is it unfair to the rest of the family or other invited guests to impose the inclusion of one of its more erratic members, even though there is no guarantee that there is a danger of anything going wrong? In his astonishingly sharp first feature The Guest, Mads Mengel considers these very questions as he constructs a thrilling and unnerving family drama about a special occasion that appears as though it may be about to go off the rails.

A striking shot opens The Guest: a car speeding down the road with a seatbelt hanging out the door, its buckle clicking against the pavement to the beat of a churlishly dissonant and threatening jazz score. Immediately we feel tense. Who is driving? Why are they driving like this, and what is about to happen? We’re recentered by a pair of parents with a newborn baby entering a hotel room at a seaside resort. Karl and Emilie are about to celebrate the Christening of their first child, who they are about to officially reveal will be named Elliot. They are expecting all of their closest family and friends to be joining them. Well, almost all of them.

The evening before the Christening, Karl, Emilie and her parents sit down for a last dinner, discussing last minute menu selections for the celebration on the morrow. “Blinis with trout roe is out, so we can have salmon or asparagus,” they debate as Rikke, Karl’s sister, checks her phone, which is buzzing with text notifications. Mother has arrived, unannounced and uninvited, taking a horrified Karl by surprise. Vibeke is charming and fluently conversational with the other guests, who likely assume that she’s just a little bit kooky and zany, but most likely harmless. Rikke and Karl have a moment aside, where she tells him that she told Vibeke that she could come, promising that she’ll be under her supervision. Karl reluctantly agrees to not immediately demanding for her departure. 

Mengel proceeds to show the ebbs and flow in Vibeke’s interactions with the other guests, showing how she weaves in and out of socially appropriate behavior, using twisted, off-kilter humor throughout to emphasize her distorted perception of her mental well-being and how baroque and grotesque she will appear to others. Thanks to that killer first shot of the film we can probably guess that this is about to be a situation where Mother is off her pills, and she is about to have an episode. Its jaw-droppingly written screenplay would already be enough to recommend The Guest as a thunderous entrance for its director, but the advanced eye for detailed, suggestive visual language, and a musical ear for the atonal and the melodies, both literally in its musical scoring and metaphorically in its witty, sly dialogues, show an advanced mastery of tone and visuals that should be beyond even reach of a first feature.

And though both stylish and clever, The Guest doesn’t lose its heart in the midst of its flurries of formal triumphs. Though having a lot of fun in the entertaining depiction of her manic outbursts, The Guest doesn’t forget to show how sad it is for someone to be so convinced of her sanity, unable to understand how unwell she is. Any director whose first feature successfully keeps this many balls in the air is essentially promising to be a major emerging talent, and it will be interesting to see where Mengel’s career progresses from here.