‘The guest’ checks people in and then kicks them out

The 2024 edition of the New York Asian Festival It will take place from July 12 to 28. Follow our coverage here.

I’m not a particularly suspicious person, but I still practice common sense when meeting strangers or hanging out in unfamiliar places. I watch people, I watch exits, and yes, when I stay overnight in a shady motel, I absolutely check mirrors and vents for peeping toms or cameras. It’s not paranoia… it’s the sign of someone who watches *a lot* of genre movies about bad people doing bad things to innocent slobs. The new South Korean initiative, The guestis one of those movies, but it comes with an interesting twist before shifting gears and becoming an effective little cat-and-mouse thriller.

Young-gyu (Han Min) and Min-cheol (Lee Ju-seung) are bad guys. They may not be out there physically harming others, but as the owners of a seedy motel in a rural area, they make a living by recording the private antics of their guests. Sex, showers, the occasional violent abuse. They record it all and pass it on to a gangster who keeps them on a tight leash. The two friends owe him money, and unless they keep paying with these videos, they could end up at the bottom of a river with some organs missing. So they’re bad guys with excuses. Things change one night, however, when a guest (Hyun Bong-sik) brutally murders a young woman and discovers that the two workers have the evidence.

Director Yeon Je-gwang makes his feature film debut with a hard-hitting, if simple, thriller, and while it won’t necessarily shake your soul, The guest The film offers a darkly entertaining ride over the seventy-seven minutes that the film runs. Though Yeon opens the film with a piece of text that highlights South Korea’s surveillance society among the people (less about government control and more about everyone having cameras on their phones and in their homes), the film isn’t really interested in exploring the idea beyond that initial introduction. It’s less of a social commentary and more of an exploitation thriller, and Yeon understands the task.

Things get going very quickly after establishing the motel’s geography and sparsely populated setting, and it’s not long before the silent guest is prowling the halls in search of the two young men. A brief moral dilemma arises even after the murder, and it’s there that we see the difference between Young-gyu and Min-cheol. While the former is happy to hand the footage over to the loan shark, Min-cheol is more than a little hesitant. It’s his fault that they’re in this mess since the borrowed money was meant to pay for his mother’s much-needed medical procedures, but he knows deep down that this is wrong. Obviously. Lee does a good job with that balance between doing the right thing and what’s much, much easier, and it’s arguably enough to make this bad guy a character we can root for.

That said, Yeon keeps downtime to a minimum, as the motel’s power goes out and the deadly game of cat and mouse begins. Chase scenes, narrow escapes, and sequences that may make you hold your breath make up the bulk of the film. The guestThe rest of the story isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but Yeon also has one or two unexpected story moments in store for viewers. It all builds up to a larger scene outside the motel before ending somewhat abruptly. Does it kill the vibe? Not really, but it does feel like there was still some gas in the tank that wasn’t fully utilized here.

The guest Ultimately, it’s a simple, monotonous thriller, but no one should tell you that’s a bad thing when it’s well executed. It’s an interesting plot that gives us bad guys to root for because they’re up against a worse guy, especially when they’re not cool bad guys or anti-heroes, but sleazy jerks spying on the unsuspecting. It’s an interesting dynamic, and combined with some strong suspense scenes and a couple of surprises, the result is a mean little adventure that does what it came to do and nothing more.

The 2024 edition of the New York Asian Festival It will take place from July 12 to 28. Follow our coverage here.

Related topics: Horror, New York Film Festival

Rob Hunter has been writing for Film School Rejects since before you were born, which is strange considering he’s so young. He’s our chief film critic and associate editor and considers “Broadcast News” to be his favorite film of all time. Feel free to say hi if you see him on Twitter. @FakeRobHunter.