The Guest is thriller or dark comedy, or both

The Guest chugs along like you know what's going to happen. It knows you know. And it's still one step ahead of you.

The film — directed by the You're Next up-and-coming duo of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett — starts as a thriller so basic that it could be shrink-wrapped and sold at a Walmart in the clearance section. An Afghanistan combat veteran shows up at the house of a dead Marine buddy, whose family welcomes him in and lets him stay over, borrow the car and prepare dinner with their sharpened cutlery. But the veteran, David (played with a psychotic gaze by Downton Abbey nobleman Dan Stevens), is not who, or what, he says he is. And then people start dying.

"There's a couple of abrupt tonal shifts …" screenwriter Barrett said during a recent stop through the Valley to promote the film. "One thing we were really trying to play with a lot was the idea of experimenting with character likability, and obviously I'm primarily referring to Dan Stevens' character — you just love him and he's so entertaining. We treat him seriously as a character, and his behavior and his reactions are consistent, and at a certain point, that becomes a darker thing."

Stevens' David, whose thousand-yard-stare requires a gun permit in a handful of states, slowly unravels, though the film has a sinister sense of humor that collects his unspooling psyche into bundles of dark comedy. The film ends in a Halloween maze with David as the haunted attraction's resident ghoul, the monster that stalks the guests. Before that, though, David mops the floor with some brazen cosmo-drinking high school kids, he blackmails the school principal, and obliterates the male competition at a house party when his muscles come in lugging the remaining kegs. David is a murderous madman, but he has his charm, an aspect of the movie that is twistedly delightful, but one that audiences might have a hard time swallowing.

"We did a similar thing with You're Next, where the movie got increasingly comedic as it went along, and climaxed with this kind of absurdist monologue," director Wingard said. "You’re Next was a gradual progression. The Guest was much more of a 90-degree turn … As a viewer, that's the kind of stuff I enjoy and find fun: when a movie pulls the rug out from under you, as long as it's grounded in a reality with characters that make sense."

I would argue that the David character makes little to no sense. He spends much of the movie helping people to only kill them in the last act. His motives are frail and without much justification. And the terrifying thriller he's crafting is yanked from him in a military twist that deflates the The Guest's more robust possibilities. But David somehow still works, if only because Stevens' is so kinetically malevolent that he outshines the material. (Stevens was on the press tour, but sidelined by an illness and unable to speak with the press.)

"[Stevens] just kind of personified what you really want out of a mysterious character like this," Wingard said. "He has to earn the characters' trust to integrate himself into the family's lives. So we wanted an actor that the audience already trusted to begin with. Their association with him is the polite, mild-mannered Matthew Crawley [from Downton Abbey], and so that association is what we're kind of playing with."

Wingard continues: "… Ultimately what we're playing with is creating a character that we want to conflict the audience. We want to throw the notion of a hero or a villain out the door, and all you should be focusing on is 'are you being entertained by this guy?' Dan had all those aspects to him. He's a very intelligent guy, he got the sense of humor of the script, and we already knew he could act." 

It was their first time working with Stevens, although Barrett and Wingard are frequent collaborators. Frequent enough that I ask them if they're sick of each other yet.

"I would say the key to our creative process is that we actually know when to give each other a lot of space," Barret said. "Like when Adam is editing, I stay completely out of the editing room, so that I can then bring objectivity to his first cut. Adam's first cuts tend to be more polished than a lot of people's final cuts … But that's about two months that I just stay out of his way while he works, and generally I'll take advantage of that time by writing. That's one of the good things about our partnership — we're doubly productive. When I'm writing a script, I tend to not show Adam any pages until I have a final draft, and I try to surprise him with the story and characters."

Wingard agrees that the they function well together and apart: "We tend to not really just hang out on a casual basis that much, even though for awhile we lived literally next door to each other. When you're shooting a movie, you're around each other every day, and then you go on these press tours … so it's not like we’re starving to hang out."

To see these two hang out behind the camera, check out The Guest, which opened Wednesday.

"One ticket for Statutory Rape, please."

Even at 50 years old, actor Errol Flynn was known as a ruthless playboy with a ravishing appetite for pretty young things. So when the Captain Blood star makes a phone call to 15-year-old's house, the mother has every right to slam the receiver down and march upstairs to rain holy hell onto her daughter. But this mother is smitten. 

And that's how quick a teenager is allowed to date and sleep with an aging Hollywood star in The Last of Robin Hood. Fame, it seems, goes a long way in smoothing out the wrinkles of social norms, and creased faces. 

Not that this dilemma is all Flynn’s fault. Beverly Aandland (Dakota Fanning) did show up to a Hollywood movie set with a fake birth certificate saying she was 18. And she never mentioned her age, even though Flynn had his suspicions she was young — too young. Later when he finds out how old she is, he doesn't recoil or jump out of the dating pool like a responsible adult, but instead he manipulates Beverly's mother, a rotten piece of work named Florence (Susan Sarandon), who justifies the pimping out of her daughter in the name of her career. "This is how all the young starlets get roles," she says convincing no one but herself.

The Last of Robin Hood is a true story told from the point of view of Beverly, who wasn't raped on her first date with Errol Flynn, though it came very close. When Flynn turns up the next day, he's head over heels for her and charms her into a relationship that lasts until his death two years later from, likely, alcohol and drug abuse. As Beverly begins to learn about Errol, she's just as smitten as her mother, who accompanies the couple everywhere they go to divert unseemly rumors and gossip magazines. Beverly reminds Errol of a "little sprite … a wood nymph," so he calls her Woodsy, which is not a flattering nickname when yelled across rooms at parties. 

Flynn is played by Kevin Kline, an actor who also dated (and married) a much-younger starlet — though Phoebe Cates was very much a legal adult when they began dating. Comparison images reveal physical similarities, although Kline’s version of Flynn is not as dashing as Jude Law’s swashbuckling lothario from The Aviator. Kline does a commendable job, except he’s just not given much to work around. Flynn could command a room and seduce women with ease, but the script writes him as a hollow shell of want and need. The frustration that Flynn was experiencing as his career faded was likely immense, but the The Last of Robin Hood seems more concerned with tacky spectacle — wooden canes to illustrate his deteriorating health, hidden flasks to show his alcohol dependence, and crushing jealousy for men Beverly's own age (including one played by Flynn's real grandson). 

While the film underhandedly acknowledges his last romance, it barely dents the complicated essence of the actor, and botches attempts to ignite curiosity about his career. At one point The Sea Hawk is brought up, but only in passing and as a joke about how awful it was. (I rather liked his pirate movies.) Only perceptive viewers will learn, if they didn't know already, that the title comes from Flynn's starring role in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood. The only other film references include a set visit to Africa for the The Roots of Heaven, a bungled three sentences on the communist flop Cuban Rebel Girls (starring Beverly), and a tiny scene with Max Casella as a young Stanley Kubrick casting Lolita. Predator of teens or not, the movie doesn't establish Flynn as a Hollywood star other than to have people gawk at him when he walks by.

Fanning, like Kline, seems to struggle with the script, which is as knotty and floatable as her nickname. Dialogue is terribly written, and occasionally terribly acted, and much of the lightweight staging and tempo give the impression of a Lifetime TV movie. I wasn't surprised to see Lifetime Films produced it — it just looks cheap. I will say this for Fanning, she does convey the innocence of and frailty of a 15 year old. Her whisper-thin frame and her childlike voice give credibility to her character's age, even as Fanning pushes closer to 21 years old.

Sarandon, though, is a mess. Her performance is all over the place, except where it needs to be. And her mother character’s motivations too complicated. By the end of the film I wasn’t sure if she really wanted Beverly to succeed, wanted a free ride or was herself in love with Errol Flynn. When Florence tells Beverly's father about Flynn's advances, the dad flips. "Errol Flynn is a walking penis," he shouts. I liked this guy, and I wanted other characters that smart in the film to balance out the stupid ones. 

So, who was Errol Flynn? This movie has no clue other than he dated a teenager, loved her and then died, and that was a sensational story back in 1959. And still is today.