Guest of Honour review: David Thewlis is a father looking for answers in this twisty thriller
Dir: Atom Egoyan; Starring: David Thewlis, Laysla De Oliveira, Luke Wilson, Alexandre Bourgeois, Rossif Sutherland, Sochi Fried, Arsinée Khanjian. No cert, 105 min
As a food safety inspector – and a particularly finicky one at that – Jim (David Thewlis) is probably not someone whose name appears at the top of many guest lists. The man is a regular Banquo of the buffet counter, often to be seen hovering sceptically by the roast with meat thermometer drawn, while proprietors look on twitchily from the sidelines. He is also the unlikely hero of this even unlikelier new suspense thriller from Canada’s Atom Egoyan, in which a bizarre and tragic intergenerational puzzle is pieced together from two different perspectives.
The first belongs to Jim’s grown-up daughter Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), and the second is Jim’s own, and each has much to discover about the strange turns taken by the other’s private life. Our story begins shortly after Jim’s death, with Veronica planning her father’s eulogy with an ever-so-slightly obsequious local priest (Luke Wilson) – a conversation that becomes increasingly confessional as it progresses.
From here, we soon skip back a few years to when Jim was in rude health, and visiting his daughter in prison: an odd place for a talented, popular, attractive music teacher in her mid-20s to be. Then we shift back a few years more to the lurid turn of events that put her there, after her good looks and frisky conducting style catch the eyes of both a 17-year-old student (Alexandre Bourgeois) and the married coach driver (Rossif Sutherland) during a school trip. Then it’s back once more to Veronica’s childhood, where her father seems to have taken a shine to her piano teacher (Sochi Fried), and then hither and yon from there until a bigger picture coheres.
It is, by design, a smashed plate of a plot, and the fun lies in picking up the fragments and second-guessing where each one might fit. And in purely technical terms, all of the narrative manoeuvrings are carefully managed: thanks to subtle variations in Mychael Danna’s swishy, lyrical score and a colour palette that drifts between wintry and autumnal, it’s always clear which of the time frames we’re in at any given moment.
Less slick, however, are the numerous gear-crunching swerves in the story itself, which ensure among other things that Jim’s expertise in the field of restaurant hygiene just happens to be invaluable in getting to the bottom of his daughter’s fate. (Dedicated Egoyanites might also spot some oblique nods towards the director’s terrific 1990s films – Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey – which his later work has struggled to match.)
The symbolism, meanwhile, comes thick and fast, but mostly thick. Rabbits loom especially large on the film’s loopy psychosomatic landscape, with an elderly, snowy-white specimen called Benjamin getting a brisker allegorical workout than any screen bunny since Fatal Attraction. If the platter of deep-fried ears (not Benjamin’s, thankfully) doesn’t make you gasp, wait until you see what happens to the droppings.
Is it eccentric? You bet. Does it dice with outright silliness? Only in every other scene. Is there much more to chew on than its riddling construction? Honestly, no. Yet for the most part, the unusual blend of quirk and intrigue grips well enough, and there’s also the considerable pleasure of watching Thewlis, a veteran character actor, sink his teeth into a rare lead role with gusto.
Jim is exactly the kind of eyebrow-arching, nostril-wrinkling paragon of jobsworthiness who would be an incidental comic villain in any other film. But Thewlis fleshes him out compellingly – and his late-night, wine-soused monologue, in which he pours out his regrets to a dining room full of strangers, is when the film lands its one clean emotional punch.
Perhaps it’s fitting that a film about a restaurant inspector should elicit so many sniffs of suspicion. But there’s a playful spice and pungency here too.
Guest of Honour is available on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday 5 June
