The Guest (2014)

Adam Wingard's The Guest arrives as a lean, mean piece of business: a soldier named David materializes at the door of a grieving family, charms them thoroughly, and then begins removing obstacles from their lives with escalating enthusiasm. Dan Stevens plays him like a catalog model who has read a manual on being human and skimmed the middle chapters. The film is a genre exercise and knows it, wearing its John Carpenter and James Cameron affections on a Members Only jacket. There is no thesis here. There is a knife, a synth score, and a Halloween dance.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is close to a vacuum. The cast is led by two white performers, with Lance Reddick arriving late as the government man who understands what David is, his presence carrying no racial commentary whatsoever; the film seems content to let him be the most competent person in any room. Anna, the daughter, does some sleuthing and earns a climactic confrontation, though the machinery remains built around a man with a knife. David offers one brief sermon in a principal's office about homophobic abuse going unaddressed, complete with a threat of litigation, and it lands as an odd flourish in a film otherwise allergic to messaging. The military experiment backstory gestures at institutional critique but settles for being a plot device.

This is a thriller with no agenda beyond the pleasure of watching a charismatic monster dismantle a suburb, and that restraint deserves a measure of respect in an era of sermonizing. We grade the vintage as dry, tannic, and entirely uninterested in flattering anyone's politics.