8.5/10. If you’d pitched me a showdown between Matthew Crawley from *Downton Abbey* and Lt. Daniels from *The Wire*, I would probably be on board, but I don’t think I could ever have imagined it would be this cool. But that’s sort of the trick of *The Guest*, a tremendous and intimate thriller about luring you in with something that feels comforting and familiar, almost too much so, and then explores the unexpected consequences of what comes next.

When David Collins shows up to the Peterson household, the family of his slain fellow solider, he is unnervingly perfect. He smiles in just the right way; he begs off in a disarming fashion when offered any bit of kindness, and tugs on just the right strings to where, before you know it, he feels like an indelible and vital part of your life. Each of the Petersons fall under his spell at some point, to where he becomes a de facto part of the family.

A great deal of credit belongs to Dan Stevens, showing and incredible amount of range and talent in the way he inhabits the titular guest, a young veteran who is perfection embodied but with something that seems just a little off. Initially I bristled a bit at the character, because there was a sort of uncanny valley effect that belied David’s initial interactions with the Peterson family. But as the film progresses, it becomes apparent that it’s an intentional and impressive choice from Stevens. He expertly conveys the way in which David both seems like a peerless individual, one who blends in to any social situations and has those around him warm up to him almost instantly, but also like someone who is putting on an act. It’s a very good act, and one that he’s clearly perfected over a long time, but one that is unnerving in how perfectly pitched it is.

That’s the greatest achievement of the film and its lead actor – the way that David embodies such warmth and such coldness at the same time. While David does terrible things, and seems insincere or at least a little mercenary in his attempts to make good with the Petersons, you get the impression that he genuinely wants to help them. Whether it comes from a sense of obligation to his fallen friend Caleb or a genuine affection for his inadvertent ward Luke, Stevens gives the impression that even if the emotions have been drained out of David and replaced with military efficiency and impulses he himself has no control over, there’s a piece of him still in there, a piece that cares about the family he’s so slyly made himself a part of.

But that just makes it all the more frightening when David shows what he’s capable of, of the smoldering beast that lurks within. Much of that, again, comes from Stevens’s performance in the title role. Those brief moments where he drops that unblinking smile, where he gazes off into nothing or focuses his eyes on some troublemaker are truly frightening. Stevens’s offers only glimpses into this individual who at times seems as much machine as man.

A great deal of that sense, however, comes from the incredibly-crafted sequences when David reveals his military training and puts it into action. When David roughs up a group of Luke’s high school bullies, he is preternaturally effective at it, with no wasted movement as he decimates these young men in seemingly effortless fashion. When he calmly lines up his shot to take out the last remaining witness at an arms deal, the cold precision of it is just as unnerving. When he gets into a firefight with military contractors at the Peterson home, he moves like an animal through the house, making his exit. And the film’s final big set piece, a heart-pumping stalk and chase through a mirror-lined, smoke-filled haunted house stands out as one of the most exciting and tense sequences on film in the last decade.

The mood of these scenes comes through not just in the images on the screen, but in the film’s use of sound. The most obvious of these is the film’s synth-heavy, gothic score. Most of the music employed is diegetic, lending to the unreal quality of these sequences, and giving it a throwback flavor that makes David’s pursuit of his prey seem of a piece with Michael Myers in *Halloween*. But just as impressive is the foley work that goes into David’s takedowns. When David is fighting a group of rowdy teenagers, you hear their bones crack, you hear their bodies thump, and it is immediately disquieting and an indication of how quietly fearsome this man really is.

David represents, in a very heightened way, our national fears about soldiers coming home from war. The Peterson patriarch explicitly references PTSD, and there’s a palpable sense that *The Guest* is engaging with a funhouse mirror version of this concern. In the same way that soldiers come home and can feel like different people to their loved ones after having been changed by their experiences at war, David is essentially a replacement for Caleb in the Peterson family, and he really is a different person. He seems familiar, filling the space in the family that Caleb used to in a way that makes everyone take a shine to him to one degree or another, and yet there is something lurking behind the practiced smile made to put you at ease. There are parts of David that he cannot turn off, violent parts, that lead him to do things he finds as regrettable as he does unavoidable.

He is also a rebuke or a response to our stories about soldiers being enhanced to become more effective weapons of war. He is a dark mirror of Captain America, a more personal and frightening version of Jason Bourne, a strikingly competent, chameleon-like man at arms who has been ravaged and warped by what’s been done to him rather than improved by it.

And yet, he ingratiates himself into the Peterson family. Laura Peterson sees him as her surrogate son. Spencer Peterson sees him as a buddy. Luke Peterson views him as an idol, a role model who makes him better equipped for the world. And Anna Peterson (in a great performance by Maika Monroe of *It Follows* fame) makes him a mix tape and sees him as hunky protector. But it’s Anna who notices how things have become too perfect, how the family’s obstacles have mysteriously fallen down around them, often in deadly fashion. That is the core of *The Guest* -- a continuing sense that everything is perfect, that everything is falling into place, but in a way that feels off, that feels wrong, that feels strange and unnerving even when you seem to get everything you want.