Opiniões dos críticos

The Guest is a self-aware, aesthetically accomplished and joyfully-bombastic throwback to '80s straight-to-video fare. Weaving in elements of thrillers, horror and the Seagal vehicles of yesteryear, [Wingard and Barrett] have crafted a wonderful homage/parody of the era's B-movie offerings that manages to never be too on-the-nose with its humour and maintains a fairly entertaining facade of legitimate plot throughout.

Wingard and Barrett have made major leaps as filmmakers since their diverting but convoluted You're Next. That film never transcended its many derivations, but The Guest is carried by an intense and surprising mood of erotic melancholia.

The Guest is another adventure in quotation-mark homage. This time, though, the marks are sarcastically real (see the first name in the closing credits). That sarcasm is all over the movie, and it's tricky. There's no reason for them to take any of this seriously, and they don't. But they do care just enough to communicate that they like their winking psycho. So do I.

Wingard and Barrett have a perfect eye and ear for this type of material. They have fun with their influences, paying homage to John Carpenter and others. They're not afraid to be silly and bold. "The Guest" could have drowned in top-heavy seriousness, while trying to make some political point. But it's really not serious at all. That's a compliment.

[It's] a familiar setup, but Barrett and Wingard take it in one unexpected direction after another, displaying obvious pleasure in their mad dash to keep topping themselves. Be forewarned, though, that both the humor and the violence get progressively sicker as the story unfolds; chances are you'll find this either hysterical or appalling.

Wingard, a formidable new name in horror who previously brought us the nifty You're Next, coolly lets things escalate from there to a state of delirious violence—it's a compulsively absurd tale fashioned as a kind of extreme allegory for the effects of grief-induced displacement. Mostly, though, the movie is an effectively bloody, breakneck ride, given an extra coat of gloss by the John Carpenter–influenced 1980s styling that is currently all the rage in the genre.

Much more confident and fluid than that earlier film, The Guest also has a more refined aesthetic sensibility than the ugly You're Next. Indeed, a climactic setpiece set in a school's gonzo Halloween tunnel display — complete with garish red corridors, walls of mirrors, and heavy smoke effects — seems to play on the very lack of continuity in the film's action scenes, fragmenting images and heightening atmosphere to the level of near-abstraction.

Mr. Stevens's watchful restraint gives the early scenes a slow burn and a sinister glaze. This emotional resonance dissipates once the violence and confusion amplify (plot elisions and lingering mystery seem to tease a sequel), but until then David is a magnetic, manipulative cipher. He knows that dreamy eyes and a corrugated stomach can deflect even the most stubborn suspicions.

The Guest may not cut deep, and its finale is a jokey afterthought, but in his flair for audio-visual embellishment, his choreographed use of smoke and mirrors, weaponry and bloodshed, faces and bodies, Wingard announces himself as a conspirator of super-cool cine-pleasure.

As with You're Next, The Guest demonstrates Wingard and Barrett's facility with sculpting fresh, witty, tonally elegant first acts that gradually shift toward endings leaning heavily on genre tropes and extensive mayhem. None of which reduces the fun to be had in the film's winsome thumbnail character sketches, well-chosen throwback stylistics and sociopathic glee.

Pasolini's Theroem this ain't, as Wingard appears to want nothing more from his film than a couple of passable jump-scares and to have Stevens administer a bunch of evil glances towards his co-stars. The action is haphazardly formulated so that for the first half of the film you're simply waiting for the ball to drop, and when it does, it transpires that Wingard has dispensed with the metaphors entirely to give himself a free pass to orchestrate an arm-flailing glitter-bomb finale.

Highly referential to the best of Eighties cinema without ever resorting to ridicule, The Guest is fast-paced fun right through to its totally awesome finale set at the best high-school haunted house ever constructed.