Danish actor Trine Dyrholm gives a magnetic performance with all guns blazing in The Guest, an intensely painful, uncomfortable but also sometimes uncomfortably funny film from writer-director Mads Mengel. The film is about a dysfunctional family and is shot in a freewheeling handheld style with lots of looming extreme closeups, evoking Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme 95 classic Festen.
Plot and Setting
Kirsten (Simon Bennebjerg) and Emilie (Mette Klakstein) are a young Danish couple with a new baby, arriving at a hip seaside hotel to host a secular-humanist christening "naming ceremony" for a large crowd of relatives. One guest even brings a guitar to perform a song for the infant, a rather Richard Curtis touch. Karl's sister (Josephine Park) is there, along with Emilie's parents (Petrine Agger and Peter Gantzler). The one person absent is Karl's formidable, emotionally volatile mother Vibeke (Dyrholm), who has bipolar disorder and has already been sectioned once.
Family Tensions
Karl is scared of his mother and angry at her, having cut off contact, apparently ready to blame her for behavioral issues because she doesn't take her meds and has caused countless chaotic scenes. To his horror, he discovers that his sister has invited her anyway and couldn't bear to tell Karl. The sister is the one who cares for Vibeke and resents Karl not sharing the burden. She also knows she would deal with the fallout from such a snub.
Vibeke arrives, beamingly friendly and celebratory, but also queenly and imperious, suspecting the invitation from her daughter and not Karl does not give her VIP status. She is a "guest," an unwelcome outsider. The blue touch-paper is lit for a gruesome firework display. Dyrholm's Vibeke is animated and charming but unnervingly inappropriate, with a sketchy sense of boundaries: she playfully slaps her daughter in a way that looks like a curtain-raiser for actual violence.
Climax and Performance
Vibeke keeps it together long enough for Karl – an excellent, understated performance from Simon Bennebjerg – to relent a little and allow her to participate. But the proceedings involve "christening" the baby in the sea, and when an increasingly over-emotional Vibeke takes charge, the film must be watched through your fingers. There is something poignant: a family scene of resentment and rage in sharp contrast to the baby's innocence. Vibeke went through what these young parents are now going through when her own children were tiny babies. Her depression, excitement, and sense of injustice are not just symptoms but authentic parts of who she is. Yet she is making life impossible for others and herself. It is a hugely watchable and intelligent performance from Dyrholm.
Festival Screening
The Guest screened at the Karlovy Vary film festival.
