The Guest review – Trine Dyrholm pulls out all the stops as a bipolar mother in dysfunctional family drama

Writer-director Mads Mengel’s film about a seaside christening disrupted by a previously shunned relative is shot in the spirit of Dogme 95

Danish actor Trine Dyrholm gives a magnetic performance with all guns blazing in this intensely painful, uncomfortable but also sometimes uncomfortably funny film from writer-director Mads Mengel; it is about a dysfunctional family and is shot in a freewheeling handheld style with lots of looming extreme closeups, a film in the spirit of Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95 classic Festen.

Karl (Simon Bennebjerg) and Emilie (Mette Klakstein) are a young Danish couple with a new baby, and have just arrived at a hip seaside hotel where they are hosting a secular-humanist christening “naming ceremony“ for a large crowd of relatives, one of whom has actually brought along a guitar to perform a song for the infant - a rather Richard Curtis touch. Karl’s sister (Josephine Park) is there, and so are Emilie’s parents (Petrine Agger and Peter Gantzler). The one person who isn’t is Karl’s formidable, emotionally volatile mother Vibeke (played by Dyrholm) who has bipolar disorder and has already been sectioned once.