Having put their uniquely sardonic spin on home-invasion horror with last year’s You’re Next, director Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett turn now to the hyper-violent genre fare of the ’80s and ’90s. The Guest, which premiered in the midnight section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is an often-hilarious hybrid of early James Cameron and early John Carpenter, applied to a secret psychopath narrative that would play fine on a double bill with something like Fear or The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. The first trailer follows the lead of the You’re Next ads, doing almost everything in its power to disguise the filmmakers’ black humor. It does, however, offer an accurate representation of the plot, which concerns a war veteran (Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, doing a kind of sociopathic spin of Chris Evans’ Captain America) who pays a visit to the family of his fallen comrade. The clip also teases the film’s over-the-top violence, which should put a wide grin on the face of any Terminator fan.
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