How far does a thriller need to stretch the bounds of credulity before it stops becoming thrilling and starts becoming… well, silly?
Such is the tightrope that the BBC’s newest show, The Guest, walks. On the one hand, it’s a cracking time. On the other, some of those plot holes really are rather holey.
At least the acting is good. Our heroine is Ria (Gabrielle Creevy, so good in In My Skin), who lives with her good-for-nothing boyfriend Lee (Sion Daniel Young) in a tiny flat in Cardiff. She’s working as a cleaner to make ends meet, but the bills aren’t adding up, and she’s having to steal food from donation boxes in supermarkets to feed herself.
At some point, her path crosses with the glamorous Fran (Eve Myles, pout working overtime). She’s a glam, blonde heiress who occupies a red-brick castle somewhere in Cardiff’s outskirts, and when she’s not busy lecturing Ria about the importance of taking what the world owes her (rich, coming from her), she’s mooching around her massive house looking rather sinister.
Fran, recognising a kindred spirit in Ria, offers to take her under her wing and teach her how to be selfish. Naturally, this goes about as well as you’d expect, and soon things start going very wrong indeed.
That the show works so well at all is down to the terrific performances and chemistry of Myles and Creevy. In the wrong hands, Ria could be grating – naïve, trusting and utterly beguiled by Fran – but Creevy plays her with such sympathy and intelligence that you do find yourself rooting for her.
Myles, on the other hand, plays a blinder as the endlessly mysterious Fran. Even if she isn’t exactly given that much to do, Myles’ ability to flip from kind and nurturing one minute, to calculating in the next is fascinating, and it’s their dynamic that keeps the show interesting.
Which is good, because as we descend deeper down the rabbit hole of their relationship, things start to get really silly.
The psychosexual undertones become blatant overtones. The show’s themes on class (best described as ‘rich people take what they want and poor people don’t’) are shoved down our throats with increasing violence.
Fran is obviously cheating on her milquetoast husband – and equally obviously, the only thing for Ria to do when she catches her at it is film her in the act. By the end of the first episode, we’ve already had our first murder. Also, there’s a random man hanging out in Fran’s guest house?
How much appetite you have for the convoluted plot – much of which stops making sense around the third episode – depends on how invested you are in Fran and Ria’s increasingly unhinged relationship. It’s certainly compelling, but the rushed finale leaves you wanting more. Or at least, wanting better.
The Guest is streaming now on BBC One
