Playing an unstable woman unexpectedly attending her grandchild's christening party, the Danish actress is a force of nature at its most wayward in Mads Mengel's excruciatingly perceptive feature debut.
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Henrik Ohsten, courtesy of Monolit Film, Karlovy Vary Film Festival A droll dramedy of bourgeois social awkwardness morphs into a deep-cut tragedy about the effects of a mother’s psychological frailty on her grown-up children, in Danish director Mads Mengel‘s impressively uncozy debut feature “The Guest.” Clean-lined and sharp-edged, with David Bauer’s cinematography washed in cool-toned summer light and line-dried under pale Scandinavian skies, the film has many hallmarks of the current Nordic drama wave: parental estrangement, familial resentments, the pained politeness of the middle-class in response to social discomfort, blondeness. But in a virtuosic yet restrained performance of volatility from actress Trine Dyrholm, it also shows a steely tensile strength that distinguishes it from its softer contemporaries. Nothing here is hygge.
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