Guest of Honour

Icon of the Cana­di­an indie scene in the 1990s, Atom Egoy­an is still plug­ging away at man­u­fac­tur­ing his high­ly per­son­al brand of eccen­tric melo­dra­mas that are often pow­ered by the emo­tion­al fall-out of a hor­rif­ic event in the past. His new one, Guest of Hon­our, arrives at the tail end of a rather patchy run which saw him attempt to lever­age his this brand and repack­age it for a more main­stream audi­ence, and while it would be extreme­ly gen­er­ous to refer to this as a return to form, it cer­tain­ly marks the gen­tle flat­ten­ing of a down­ward curve.

David Thewlis plays a per­nick­ety, Toron­to-based pub­lic health inspec­tor named Jim Davis (no rela­tion to the cre­ator of Garfield, alas) who goes about his busi­ness slap­ping fines and clo­sure notices on the rat-infest­ed eater­ies he duti­ful­ly fre­quents. We then meet his daugh­ter Veron­i­ca (Laysla De Oliveira), a teacher who is in prison for an undis­closed but com­plex crime involv­ing sex­u­al con­tact with one of her students.

There is a sug­ges­tion that some­thing is amiss and unseen evi­dence exists that could eas­i­ly exon­er­ate her – but for some rea­son she’s not all that wor­ried about it being uncov­ered. Egoy­an flips back and forth between the duelling time­lines as Jim opts to clear his daughter’s name while we slow­ly dis­cov­er the true extent of the crimes com­mit­ted. All the while, Veronica’s own moti­va­tions become the focus of deep­er explo­ration, as she believes that her father was unfaith­ful to her moth­er while she was in the late stages of can­cer because of a hazy child­hood memory.

There’s a whole lot of plot packed into a rel­a­tive­ly curt run­time, and Egoy­an opts to pad things out with var­i­ous pro­fes­sion­al inter­ludes, such as Jim’s bizarre con­fronta­tion with some Amern­ian restau­ran­teurs hold­ing a job lot of dead rab­bits and a friend who just wants to make some deep-fried rab­bit ears. Per­haps in his pomp, the once-reli­able writer-direc­tor could’ve pulled this one off, but it all comes across as scat­ter­shot and hys­ter­i­cal – Jim’s job has no real impact on the sto­ry, sup­ply­ing a bit of colour to what would’ve been an oth­er­wise drab and point­less mys­tery runaround.

Still, if it doesn’t amount to all that much, it’s cer­tain­ly engag­ing in the moment, and the slow-release of infor­ma­tion, while over­ly schemat­ic, does help to keep things tick­ing along.