The Guest

The family is where we are most easily wounded. 

Franz Kafka 

Following L’estranea, Il fuoco che ti porti dentro and Un jeu dangereux, Mads Mengel’s The Guest adds another entry to this year’s cinematic gallery of overbearing mothers. Here, however, the intrusiveness comes with a clinical explanation: Vibeke has mental health problems. As if the other mothers needed a diagnosis to be just as devastating. 

The film follows in the footsteps of Danish Dogme cinema, with its restless camera, tight close-ups and realism designed to make the audience uncomfortable. The reference to Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen is unmistakable: all it takes is a family celebration for bourgeois respectability to start falling apart. Yet the original looms larger than this reworking, and a few weaknesses in the screenplay prevent the film from delivering its full impact. 

Its most interesting aspect is the clash between two models of motherhood. On one side stands Vibeke, outrageous, exuberant, affectionate and incapable of respecting conventions when she finds them hypocritical; on the other, her son’s bourgeois family, with its composure, rules and carefully managed normality, which is suspicious precisely because it seems so impeccable. Vibeke may be excessive, intrusive and even unbearable, but she possesses a vitality that Karl and Emilie’s immaculate world seems to have painstakingly sterilised. And when she sniffs out hypocrisy, she certainly has no intention of saving anyone’s face: her speciality is turning other people’s discomfort into an impromptu spectacle. 

The issue, then, is not simply how difficult it is to have a mother like this, but what price one pays for belonging to a respectable family. Vibeke’s transgressiveness does not automatically make her innocent, just as her opponents’ self-discipline does not necessarily make them any better. Her illness complicates our judgement, but does not define the whole character: reducing her to a clinical case would be an all too convenient way of dismissing everything she calls into question. 

The title has its own irony: Vibeke is the unwanted guest, the person no one would want at their party, who, once she arrives, makes it impossible to ignore what everyone would rather keep outside the door. But the intruder is not just the mother: it is the past, turning up uninvited, disturbing bourgeois tranquillity and exposing the cracks in normality. After all, some families are willing to welcome anyone, as long as it is not someone they truly know. 

This is where The Guest finds its most fertile insight, setting the excess of a woman who cannot or will not restrain herself against the composure of those who have learned to contain everything, including the things they would be better off confronting. It is a pity that the screenplay does not maintain the same precision throughout and that the film, despite its interesting Danish background and taste for the grotesque, never quite escapes the shadow of Festen. The mother arrives, disrupts the party and exposes a few conventions; cinema itself, however, could have dared to go further. 

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. 

Leo Tolstoy