‘The Guest’ Review: A Superb Trine Dyrholm Adds Unsentimental Value to a Piercing Family Drama

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.

It is set, however, in the highly convivial surroundings of a plush seaside hotel, where well-dressed guests have been invited to celebrate with Karl (Simon Bennebjerg) and Emilie (Mette Klakstein Wiberg) at the naming party for their newborn son, Elliott. They have designed the event as a kind of secular baptism rite: a few sweet words spoken, a dip in the shallows of the sea for the infant, followed by a nice dinner and drinks. And so there’s a lightly sardonic sense of humor at play, as amid the preparatory kerfuffle, Karl’s wealthy, unimpeachably respectable in-laws treat with war-room seriousness the vital question of whether asparagus or salmon would be a preferable starter, and Karl’s sister Rikke (a terrific Josephine Park) wonders what to do with her dog, whom she believes dislikes her.

But there’s also a feeling of approaching chaos, which we sense during an efficient prologue of a car speeding along a highway with the driver-side safety belt caught in the door, buckle bouncing crazily against the asphalt. At the asparagus/salmon roundtable, Rikke turns down a phone call and avoids her brother’s sixth-sense worried gaze. A jaunty passage of Lasse Aagaard’s expressive score gives way to a nervy plucked-string-and-single-piano-note motif. And then, suddenly, she’s just here.

Rikke and Karl’s mother Vibeke (Dyrholm) — from whom Karl has pointedly distanced himself for some time, and who has never even met Emilie, let alone the baby — arrives to a flurry of flustered introductions and hastily rearranged expressions. Only Karl remains unmoved, silently telegraphing his displeasure to Rikke, who, he then discovers, had been the one to suggest to Vibeke that she could come. While most of the conflict flows outward from Vibeke to her adult children, Mengel and co-writer Christian Bengtson (“Chrysanthemum”) also keenly observe the sibling dynamic between the brother who cut off all contact and the sister who took upon herself the duty of care for their unruly, scathingly unappreciative mother.

At first Karl seems to be overreacting. Vibeke charms his in-laws, coos over the baby and, according to Karl’s quick furtive search of her handbag, appears to be taking her meds. At worst it seems her lack of filter might cause a bloom of embarrassment here and there, when she’s a little too loudly critical of Karl’s life choices, or a shade too drunkenly resentful of frazzled Rikke’s attempts to keep her calm. But eccentricity is only the visible tip of the vast iceberg of Vibeke’s mental health issues, and soon Karl and Rikke are conferring in low whispers about whether, and when, to slip some ground-up sleeping pills into her drink.

Despite the seriocomic set-up, as Vibeke gets more unstable, Mengel refuses to play her irrationality for laughs, instead taking the more difficult route of earnestness. When, after one of Vibeke’s outbursts, a blushing guest takes to the stage to distract everyone with a song she has composed for Elliott, a more obvious screenplay would have had a laugh at the singer’s hippy-dippy expense. But the song is sweet and sincere without being twee, and just as in every scenario that could go either way, we are denied the comedic pressure valve that might release a little of the squirm. This darker and more truthfully melancholic mood is expertly steered by Dyrholm, who manages to make Vibeke deeply sympathetic yet impossible to root for — a woman both under the helpless influence of, and a little bit in love with, a psychological disorder so deeply ingrained that without it, she simply doesn’t know who she’d be.

As though through a split diopter, every situation can be assessed through Karl’s perspective, but also through Vibeke’s own rattling, tunnel-visioned point of view. No matter how unreasonable her behavior, you can see how, from within the eye of the storm of a condition that bedeviled her kids’ fraught childhoods and has previously seen her committed, she forcefully believes that she is simply seeing more clearly than everyone else, and spitting truths that others, with their averted gazes and strained chit-chat, are too cowardly to acknowledge. For all the anxiety it induces, “The Guest” has deep compassion for Vibeke, and for Karl and Rikke too — for those who shine brightest right before they flame out, and for the people nearest to them, who get burned.