Guest of Honour – A Drama With Unfulfilled Potential (Early Review)

Atom Egoyan is an important figure in Canadian film. Guest of Honour, his latest film, sees his nationality shine visibly through thanks to the title’s spelling as Honour uses a non-American u! Happy Canada Day! In the film, Egoyan directs David Thewlis as restaurant owner-turned-food inspector named Jim. As dramatic intrigue unfolds involving a scandal with his daughter at the centre, he thrillingly audits restaurants around Hamilton, Ontario. The film is a mixed bag, never seeming to even begin to rise to its full potential. Instead, it stays the course for a bare-bones narrative that was difficult to care about. The issues that drag it down are very systemic, in contrast to its high notes.

Egoyan’s directorial hand is very visible in a well-defined and carefully tasteful style ingrained in the film. It’s easy to get caught up in the creative cinematography and smooth editing, which rarely falters in bridging together the strains of the nonlinear story. Special consideration should be given to the lighting, which goes a long way to make some of Guest of Honour’s most memorable and stunning visual moments. These technical aspects, while pretty impressive, are still subtle enough to not upstage the drama.

Meanwhile, though Thewlis is terrific, he should have been more of an anchor to the whole film. He seems to flourish here, toeing an entertaining line between charming and emotionally detached. He manages to make even the most contrived plot points seem believable, and is a joy to watch even in less comfortable moments. De Oliveira, playing Jim’s daughter Veronica, is as much a lead as Thewlis is. While her parts are admittedly weaker than Thewlis’, that can’t be pinned on her solid performance. No other cast members stand out as particularly notable. 

Guest of Honour’s fatal flaws lie in its story and script. A large portion of the plot is pretty stupid and so unbelievable that it was tough to seriously get invested. Having a bizarre plot with characters who do questionable things is not necessarily a death sentence. It’s often a terrific gateway to interesting and introspective stories, IF the film can deliver on these overarching elements. Nothing in the way the film is told elevates it beyond being pointlessly confusing, which makes it difficult to empathize with anyone. This extends to many aspects. It feels halfway there, with the stage only ever set for a layered and genuinely interesting narrative.

For how much fanfare and detail goes into it, the story is also surprisingly bare. Here, it’s compensated by a strangely uneven nonlinear style which is often hard to follow. Yet again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but here it just doesn’t come together. There are many techniques and scenes which break from the ‘standard playbook’ of storytelling on Guest of Honour’s scale here: scenes with no immediately clear purpose, nonlinear structure, et cetera. Without breaking free of some conventions, any film is likely destined to be very surface-level. The film definitely has a surface, but since it never effectively builds off its narrative quirks and weird trashiness, we’re left to deal with it as is. In all its very earnest eccentricity, it’s not a very flattering look. 

This is why Thewlis’ solo scenes, inspecting restaurants and whiling away the hours alone in his house while tending to Veronica’s pet rabbit, are the only times where Guest of Honour fully works. He injects enough believability and subtlety into these scenes, which may seem expendable on paper, to make them unexpectedly engrossing. If only the rest of the film followed suit.

Guest Writer