The Guest

Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett turn their gaze on the creepy stranger sub-genre after deconstructing the slasher movie in last year’s You’re Next. Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens plays David, outwardly the sort of yes ma’am, no ma’am blue-eyed super-soldier to make Captain America blush, who turns up on the Peterson family’s small town doorstep claiming to have served with their son, who was killed in action. Mum (Sheila Kelley), Dad (Leland Orser) and youngest Luke (Brendan Meyer) are instantly suckered, leaving it to sceptical daughter Anna (Maika Monroe) to start questioning the steadily increasing mortality rate.

It’s mostly a great ride: a mishmash of The Hitcher and The Stepfather, with a sprinkling of Universal Soldier and a heavy 80s influence in the aesthetic and score, which somehow manages to be both subtle and very broad (often in the same scene) in its self-aware pastiche. The overarching trend for revisionist pulp will get tiresome sooner rather than later, but The Guest doesn't outstay its welcome thanks to cheeky wit and brilliantly wry performances from Stevens, who never flinches from stoic, almost otherworldly evil despite his frequently hilarious dialogue, and Orser as the Peterson's bewildered, alcoholic, middle-manager patriarch. Slight, but lots of fun.