Movie Review: 'The Guest'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Dan Stevens was unceremoniously killed off as Matthew Crawley, the third cousin once removed of Lord Grantham, in television's "Downton Abbey" because he wanted a movie career.
Now he's got one.
And following a few small, supporting parts in movies including The Fifth Estate and A Walk Among the Tombstones, he now gets his first lead role on the big screen.
It's a showy turn and he's up to the task.
In the thriller, The Guest, Stevens stars as the fatigue-clad David Collins, a recently discharged soldier who shows up a few days before Halloween at the door of the four-member Peterson family in a small town in New Mexico. 
The Petersons are still mourning the loss of their son and brother, Caleb, who was killed in Afghanistan.
"I was with him when he died," David tells them. "He made me promise to find his family and tell them that I loved them."
Polite, soft-spoken, charming, and friendly, David claims to have been the best friend of Caleb, whose mother Laura (Sheila Kelley), father Spencer (Leland Orser), sister Anna (Maika Monroe), and kid brother Luke (Brendan Meyer) invite the temporarily homeless Collins to stay with them for a stretch.
While accepting their hospitality as a houseguest and sleeping in Caleb's room, David also insinuates his helpful way into each of their everyday lives so as to help them cope with their grief, deal with other people, and get on with their lives.
But there's something very much off about David.
Whether the Petersons know it or not, it's obvious to us that there's something else going on here, some other agenda being carried out, something sinister.
And however suspicious we were before, once a seemingly coincidental series of accidental deaths occurs, we're sure of it.
Sure of what, however, will not be revealed here, but suffice to say that we've come a long way from Downton Abbey, that it's not an obvious or predictable plot thrust, and the genre combo in question ends up being quite different than what the early reels set us up to expect.
Director Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die, Autoerotic, What Fun We were Having) and his regular screenwriter, Simon Barrett, also collaborated on 2013's You're Next, another kind of home-invasion thriller and an improbably humorous and enjoyable one at that. In The Guest, they have introduced horror elements into a twisty mix, but not in the usual generic way.
And they absolutely avoid the trap of taking themselves too seriously. On the contrary, they seem to have had a very good time – as will their target audience – with the campy and satiric asides.
Here's a shocker that juggles "vicious" and "nasty" and "fun" and "games" and pulls it off.
Wingard builds the suspense and ratchets up the tension slowly but surely, establishing the family's mundane dynamic in the first half while saving the Big Reveal for the wilder and faster – but not necessarily better -- second half.
Stevens, bringing more than leading-man looks to the party, turns out to be strongly charismatic, a quality that his director both recognizes and employs by cutting to frequent lingering and insinuating closeups, inviting us to study Stevens' face and features and take note of the slight, subtle way that his expression and demeanor change.
And if the extended climax is too drastic a tonal change and goes on too long, well, we're still grateful for the way we were entertained while being manipulated into entertaining generic expectations that led to a legitimate surprise or two.
So we'll show up on the doorstep of 2½ stars out of 4. Who'd have guessed that The Guest would have such zest and leave us this impressed?
