Danish actor Trine Dyrholm gives a magnetic performance with all guns blazing in this intensely painful, uncomfortable but also sometimes uncomfortably funny film from writer-director Mads Mengel. The film, shot in a freewheeling handheld style with lots of looming extreme closeups, is in the spirit of Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme 95 classic Festen.
Plot and Characters
Karl (Simon Bennebjerg) and Emilie (Mette Klakstein) are a young Danish couple with a new baby. They have just arrived at a hip seaside hotel where they are hosting a secular-humanist christening "naming ceremony" for a large crowd of relatives. One guest has even brought a guitar to perform a song for the infant, a rather Richard Curtis touch. Karl's sister (Josephine Park) is there, along with Emilie's parents (Petrine Agger and Peter Gantzler). The one person who isn't is Karl's formidable, emotionally volatile mother Vibeke (played by Dyrholm), who has bipolar disorder and has already been sectioned once.
Family Tensions
Karl is scared of his mother and angry at her. He has cut off contact, apparently ready to blame her for behavioral issues on the grounds that she doesn't take her meds and has caused numberless chaotic scenes. Yet to his horror, he discovers that his sister has gone ahead and invited her anyway and couldn't quite bear to tell Karl. She is the one who has to care for Vibeke and perhaps resents Karl not doing his share of the heavy lifting. She also knows that she would have to deal with the fallout resulting from a snub of this magnitude.
Vibeke's Arrival
So Vibeke arrives, beamingly friendly and celebratory, but also queenly and imperious, obviously suspecting that the invitation, which comes from her daughter and not Karl, does not exactly give her VIP status. She is a "guest", a not especially welcome outsider. The blue touch-paper has been lit for a gruesome firework display. Dyrholm's Vibeke is animated and charming but also unnervingly inappropriate, with a sketchy sense of boundaries: she playfully slaps her daughter to reprimand her in a way that looks like a curtain-raiser for actual violence.
Climax and Performance
Vibeke keeps it together long enough for Karl – an excellent, understated performance from Simon Bennebjerg – to relent a little and allow Vibeke to participate. But the proceedings involve "christening" the baby in the sea, and when an increasingly over-emotional Vibeke takes charge of this, the film has to be watched through your fingers. There is something very poignant here: a family scene of resentment and rage, in sharp contrast to the baby's innocence. And it hardly needs to be said that Vibeke went through what these young parents are now going through when her own children were tiny babies. Her depression, her excitement, her sense of injustice – these are not just symptoms, they are authentic parts of who she is. And yet Vibeke is making life impossible for others and herself. It is a hugely watchable and intelligent performance from Dyrholm. The Guest screened at the Karlovy Vary film festival.
