Meet Ria, the unworldly naif of BBC One’s latest slice of grade-A codswallop The Guest. Ria is “poor and hopeless”. We can tell that this is the case because she can’t use chopsticks, hovers wan and embarrassed over a food donation crate at the supermarket, and lives in one of those dingy, EastEnders-style flats that seem allergic to lightbulbs.
And meet her new boss Fran. Fran is “rich and mysterious”, and we can tell that this is the case because she owns a Roomba vacuum, speaks in a curiously monotone register as if she’s a drowsy cult leader, and has a kitchen that looks like a Lakeland showroom.
Thrown together as house cleaner and employer, respectively, these polar opposites embark upon an entirely ordinary and professional working relationship. Only joking!
The Guest is the sort of hogwash that used to clog up the Channel 5 schedules on weekday afternoons, but has since migrated to BBC primetime. They resemble little more than ambient television – pretty faces and loud music cues carrying us through nicely predictable story beats. I suppose they’re also just very easy to make. Get a pair of decent actors and a fancy McMansion, crowbar in some light cliffhangers and Bob’s your uncle – instant copy-paste thriller.
Here the inspiration seems to be the American psycho-dramas of the early Nineties – The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female and Pacific Heights are all invoked – with their limp homoeroticism and themes of class warfare. The Guest’s first episode even climaxes with a wildly dramatic plummet off a balcony, that tried-and-tested method of psychopath-dispatch familiar to anyone who’s watched too many of these things.
Ria (played by Gabrielle Creevy, of the BBC comedy-drama In My Skin) bonds quickly with Eve Myles’s Fran, who seems eager to transform Ria from a broke and directionless young woman into a moneyed firebrand like her – she gives her pep talks, transforms her wardrobe, and insists she ditch her layabout boyfriend for a richer alternative.
Ria is flattered, but has a handful of misgivings. No, not the fact that Fran is very obviously a total kook, but more that the empty guest house she’s been instructed never to enter very clearly has a man inside, and she keeps being frightened by an eerie old gardener on the property named Derek.
Ria, of course, is the kind of thriller heroine who thinks nothing of pulling out her camera-phone to record her new boss having a mid-afternoon bang-a-thon with a man who isn’t her husband, but is also too dense to heed endless warnings about her bizarre new place of employment.
Creevy, to her credit, navigates the nonsense wonderfully – she’s a real find, playing every one of The Guest’s ludicrous plot twists with likeable naturalism. Myles, too, is endlessly watchable, even if writer Matthew Barry asks little of her besides providing vague, golden-haired menace and a few scenes where she bluntly recites the show’s Big Themes about class, privilege and social mobility.
As The Guest unfolds, piling psychosexual twists on top of one another like some deranged game of Jenga, the plotting gets ever-sillier, the actual point of it all more and more unclear. That said, this is the kind of leaden, painfully literal silliness seemingly designed to be watched while you have one eye on your phone, so perhaps it doesn’t even matter?
