Guest of Honour

An exceedingly oddball piece of work, Guest of Honour follows David Thewlis’ health inspector Jim as he attempts to cope with his daughter’s (Laysla De Oliveira’s Veronica) recent incarceration and the various events leading up to that point. Filmmaker Atom Egoyan delivers a lurid, trashy melodrama that is, initially, fairly engrossing, as the writer/director elicits strong performances from his cast and throws in enough twists to keep things interesting – with, in terms of the latter, the time-shifting narrative effectively infusing the proceedings with a fairly irresistible sense of mystery. It’s disappointing to note, then, that Guest of Honour gets less and less compelling as time progresses, as the picture suffers from an overly deliberate pace that becomes somewhat stifling beyond a certain point – with the resolution of the story’s myriad of sordid plot threads leaving Egoyan with little to do. (There is, having said that, a fantastic late-in-the-game sequence involving Jim’s drunken confession at a restaurant.) The final stretch is, as a result, somewhat anticlimactic and even a little tedious, which is too bad, certainly, given that few contemporary filmmakers are as enthusiastically willing to dip into melodrama as Egoyan.

** out of ****