“Family is family,” notes a character at the beginning of Danish director Mads Mengel’s low-key but emotionally gripping three-hander The Guest, at a point in time when the biggest problem facing Karl (Simon Bennebjerg) and Emilie (Mette Klakstein Wiberg) — the proud middle-class parents of newborn baby Elliot — is whether to order asparagus or salmon as the starter option for their child’s lavish christening party. What could possibly go wrong? We’re about to find out; not only is there a clue in the title, Mengel also gives us a tantalisingly brief close-up shot of a moving car, the safety belt hanging out of the door.
The guest is Karl’s mother Vibeke (Trine Dyrholm), a perfectly affable middle-aged woman who seems a little bawdy in her sense of humor and is certainly more bohemian than her son and his super-straight in-laws. Everybody takes to her instantly, listening raptly to her spooky story about hitch-hiking with a madman and taking her talk about joining a choir and studying Strindberg at college at face value, a long-standing pursuit that her daughter (and Karl’s sister) Rikke (Josephine Park) prefers to take with a pinch of salt. Karl, however, is on edge, and so is Mengel’s restless hand-held camera, which floats unsteadily and closes in cautiously on significant micro-moments. Something is not quite right.
Or rather someone, and that person is Vibeke. In the grand tradition of Danish cinema, no good can come of a get-together, and though there’s nothing quite as calamitous as Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film Festen (The Celebration) — which, coincidentally, featured Dyrholm in a supporting role — The Guest is a similar study of a family in freefall after its biggest skeleton comes tumbling unexpectedly from the closet. That secret is Vibeke’s fragile mental health, which Karl has been dealing with simply by ignoring both it and her, a factor that will later explain his decision to embrace a mundane life as a manager with the car-hire company owned by his father-in-law (The Boss of it All’s Peter Gantzler).
Rikke, on the other hand, has a different coping mechanism. Like Karl, she is also in denial, but of a different kind. “She’s over the top,” she snaps. “That’s her personality, not her illness — that’s how she is.” Rikke, though, is much closer to her mother than Karl is, and that familiarity — she sees her every other day — means that her complacency could be just as damaging as Karl’s paranoia. This all-or-nothing tension is at the core of Mengel’s drama; if Vibeke is off her meds, how bad can it get? We get a taste of that when, during the christening ceremony, Vibeke plunges the baby into the sea, much to everyone’s alarm.
The beauty of Mengel’s film is that the horror of the situation is always in the anticipation, mirroring the awful reality of living with mental illness. Vibeke’s condition is never revealed; while it is certainly mentioned that she was once sectioned and continues to have “episodes”, that’s not what The Guest is about.
In that respect, Dyrholm has certainly read the memo and plays Vibeke accordingly; we see her as she sees herself — a woman who just wants to enjoy life, who wants to please, an emotion encompassed quite perfectly in a scene where Vibeke stumbles on a raucous teenage party. She wants that anarchy in her life and doesn’t understand why her own kids turned out to be so boring. Why shouldn’t she play football in her underwear while her pants dry?
Denmark has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of acting talent, and The Guest is proof of that. Though Dyrholm is undoubtedly the main attraction — she and Sandra Hüller are currently way ahead of the pack when it comes to actresses who could possibly succeed Isabelle Huppert as the queen of European cinema — the terrific younger cast are more than a match for such a heavyweight. Both Bennebjerg and Park play the history of the situation and not the moment; they know what could happen, and their attempts to stop it are just as psychotic, including several attempts to spike her drinks with sleeping pills.
Oblivious to all this is baby Elliot, who has all this to look forward to in later life, assuming Vibeke makes it (and there are no guarantees). The unspoken question is, what will he make of it all? (If the matter is ever discussed.) Will he turn out like his father, his auntie or, god forbid, his grandmother? As the film says up front, “Family is family” — and, like it or not, nobody gets a choice in the matter.
Title: The Guest
Festival: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
Director: Mads Mengel
Screenwriters: Mads Mengel, Christian Bengtson
Cast: Trine Dyrholm, Simon Bennebjerg, Josephine Park, Mette Klakstein Wiberg, Peter Gantzler
Sales: LevelK
Running time: 1 hr 40 mins