The Perfect Host

If you’re anything like me, the first thing you’ll want to do after seeing The Perfect Host is hop on a flight bound for Hollywood, break into M. Night Shyamalan’s house, savagely beat him to within an inch of his life, and then force him to watch this film all the while screaming “THIS IS HOW YOU DO TWISTS YOU FUCKING SWINE!!” It’s not as smart as it thinks it is, but I still found it endearingly clever, much, I suppose, as a dinner party with a sociopath would be…

Watching the trailer for last year’s Sundance darling, released theatrically July 1^st, it becomes immediately clear that this is a movie that will live and die around David Hyde Pierce’s performance, and thankfully, he delivers. John Taylor (Clayne Crawford), a bank robber fresh off his latest score -though not unscathed- decides to lay low for the evening by conning his way into the home of Warwick Wilson (Hyde Pierce), who is at that very moment, preparing for a dinner party. After that, things take a turn for the weird…

Take From Dusk Till Dawn, remove the vampires, and add in the organized chaos of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and you’ve got the basic recipe for The Perfect Host. Well, take Tarantino’s writing credit off it too, because the dialogue gets a bit forced after Warwick reveals himself to be psycho. Yes, Hyde Pierce is really able to sell the crazy, but the tension quickly turns into tedium and the psychological cat-and-mouse game taking place before you just becomes rather boring…

Even more so than Hyde Pierce’s acting (he’s really one of those actors I wish would get more roles, because I always seem to like him in whatever he does), it’s the twists that make this movie and they more than redeem for the eventual slowing of the flow as well as the real lack of meaningful character development. It’s a film that doesn’t want to be pigeonholed, dabbling at various points in ‘heist’, ‘mystery-thriller’, and ‘comedy-noir’, though not wanting to be defined as any one of those genres. Not a great movie, but like most decent dinner parties, you’ll walk away amused, puzzled, but ultimately sated…