Were someone to organize a school dance around the year in horror, it’s pretty clear who would be standing on stage like Carrie White at the end of the evening. Class of 2024, please give a warm round of applause to your newly crowned king and queen of Halloween: Dan Stevens and Maika Monroe.
Stevens has been all over the genre this year, delivering delightfully idiosyncratic performances in no fewer than three monster movies; that’s him as the testy gangster villain of Abigail, the menacing weirdo villain of Cuckoo, and the kooky kaiju veterinarian of Godzilla x Kong: The New World. What range, and what proof that the dashingly English leading man is fully attending to his dark side these days. Meanwhile, the year’s most hyped horror movie, Longlegs, anchors its creeping dread to Monroe’s restrained but wonderfully offbeat turn as a driven, semi-psychic FBI rookie. While much of the excitement around the movie centered on Nicolas Cage going full madman, it’s Monroe who holds Longlegs together with her adhesive mixture of growing fear and obsessive curiosity.
If you somehow did get these two performers together (will they be attending the Neon holiday party in December?), it would qualify as a reunion. After all, Stevens and Monroe shared the screen a decade ago in The Guest, Adam Wingard’s coolly entertaining thriller about an Army veteran who brings the war home when he pops up in a small town and insinuates himself into the lives of a grieving military family. Ten years later, the film looks like something of a chrysalis moment for its two budding stars: It established Monroe as a dreamy Final Girl of the 21st century, while offering Stevens his first major role in a genre to which he’s increasingly devoted his talents and classical good looks.
Back then, it was bracing to see the latter shed the upper-crust manners of Matthew Crawley, especially if you only knew Stevens from his breakout role on Downton Abbey. In The Guest, he deliciously subverts his PBS star power — and tries on an impeccable American accent — to play David Collins, an Army sergeant who shows up unannounced on the doorstep of a fallen fellow enlistee’s family home. The performance tucks one transformation into another: Stevens sculpts himself, physically and temperamentally, into the shape of a special-forces adonis, only to reveal something darker underneath that.
David, with his blonde hair, blue eyes, and glistening pecs, looks like Captain America. And he kind of sounds like him too, speaking softly and politely to civilians. Still, there’s something rather quietly, disquietingly intense about the guy. His smile lingers a little too long. His eyes flicker with something more than patriotic duty. The aw-shucks model soldier routine turns out to be a form of camo, disguising David’s savagery. We’re watching a wolf slowly shave off his sheep’s clothing — and, on another level, watching Stevens peel off the proper leading-man nobility he’d begin to forego for weirder character-actor roles.
The Guest is Wingard’s version of a yuppies-in-peril thriller, one of those movies where an all-American family is infiltrated by a stranger more insidious than they initially appear. Supposedly fulfilling a promise to his slain friend and platoon mate, David charms his way into the Peterson clan by being whatever each of them need him to be — a surrogate son to bereaved parents Laura (Sheila Kelley) and Spencer (Leland Orser), a protective older brother and role model to the teenage Luke (Brendan Meyer). Only 20-year-old daughter Anna (Monroe) suspects there’s something not quite right about this military man… and one glimpse of his bared abs hormonally short-circuits her rational skepticism right quick.
This was Monroe’s first starring role, and also the start of her run as an uncommonly sensitive scream queen. There’s always something searching about the characters she plays in horror movies. It’s her gaze that dominates. And she has a way of making danger feel like an outgrowth of her emotions — emerging from her suburban heartbreak in It Follows, from her voyeuristic alienation in Watcher, from her forensic fascination in Longlegs. In so much as The Guest has a heartbeat outside its lean, mean genre mechanics, it comes from Monroe, and the internal tug-of-war she creates between girlish infatuation and mounting distrust. The film’s climax plays shrewdly on that tension, setting a suspenseful evasion to the synth-pop mixtape she made for the hunky killer who’s plummeted her life into chaos.
Wingard, along with regular writer Simon Barrett, has dabbled in franchise fare over the last decade — reviving the Blair Witch brand with a disappointing sequel, staging a couple of blockbuster team-ups for Godzilla and Kong. The Guest is still his creative pinnacle, a pastiche with panache to spare. While the plot recalls Hollywood potboilers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the style echoes hipper milestones. There’s a little of The Terminator in David’s eventual rampage, and a lot of Halloween in the autumnal small-town imagery, to say nothing of the late Lance Reddick’s appearance as a Dr. Loomis-like figure who comes looking for the monster he’s unleashed. (The synth-heavy score by Steve Moore splits the difference between these influences, evoking Carpenter and Cameron.)
Beyond the nasty thrills, there’s a surprising political bite to The Guest. In retrospect, it looks like an unlikely companion piece to the biggest hit of its year, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, another movie about how the Army turns people into killing machines who then have to figure out how to turn off that part of themselves once they come home. David is like a walking cautionary tale about the military industrial complex — a human time bomb that can’t be defused. The movie’s most provocative point is that Americans will accept unspeakable violence when it’s serving their interests. More chilling than any of the bloodshed is the scene where the bullied Luke confesses he doesn’t care that David has killed his sister’s friend and his dad’s boss, so long as the vet keeps serving and protecting his family.
Wingard’s disco-nightmare style is seductive. But it’s the performances he elicits that make The Guest such magnetic, memorable pulp. Over the years — and especially this year — Stevens and Monroe have become two of the brightest stars in the genre, a boon to any project they touch. All that starts here, at the moment where their career paths intersected. This slick thriller was their invitation to the horror party. It’s been livelier with them on the guest list.
The Guest is available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
