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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE PERFECT HOST John Taylor (Clayne Crawford) is a career criminal fresh from a bank heist and on the run from the law. With nowhere else to turn, he finds himself on the doorstep of one Warwick Wilson (David Hyde Pierce), a man who appears to be his polar opposite: a mild-mannered, fastidious host preparing for an elegant dinner party. These may be standard mystery/suspense tropes, but the set-up is so well executed that The Perfect Host could have been a taut thriller in the vein of Sydney Lumet or even Hitchcock. Instead, writer/director Nick Tomnay quickly turns to labyrinthine pop-psych horror conventions, where anything and everything is up for grabs. It’s ambitious, to be sure, but what is meant to be intricate turns merely convoluted, bordering on illogical. A detailed plot synopsis would reveal too much, but suffice it to say the film starts to go off the rails once the imaginary houseguests show up. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie. Warwick
turns out to be a sociopath of the Norman Bates or Hannibal Lecter
variety—at least that seems to be what Tomnay is going for. But while
those characters’ neuroses fit into a perfect context, Warwick, like
much of the film, almost exists in a vacuum. He’s given no backstory or
underlying motives; he’s crazy simply because the script demands it.
And it’s too much to believe that Taylor comes upon someone like Warwick by
sheer happenstance. The same can be said for the myriad plot twists,
which pile up in a rather arbitrary fashion, without much regard to
internal logic or rules of any sort. It’s a shame, because Tomnay’s
direction is remarkably assured for a first-time filmmaker, and Pierce
delivers an impressive star turn made up of equal parts mirth and
malice. The end result, however, is much like Warwick’s phantom dinner
party: impeccably planned and carefully orchestrated but virtually
empty.
Brian Theobald
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