Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: The Perfect Host

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they discuss it over a meal of duck and red wine. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week we’ll be discussing The Perfect Host, starring David Hyde Pierce as an effete would be party host whose plans are ruined by a bank robber on the lam. But everything is not what it seems! Spoilers follow.

Next Week: Trust – David Schwimmer directs Clive Owen and Catherine Keener as parents whose teenage daughter is preyed upon by an online sexual predator.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Jeremiah White: For most of its runtime, Nick Tomnay’s The Perfect Host is an amiable enough little oddity. Sitting on the fence between The Human Centipede’s horror and Hard Candy’s thriller, without fully committing to either, always feels a bit awkward, but Clayne Crawford is believable as the dangerous criminal and the shaggy protagonist (not to mention Ray Liotta’s offspring), and David Hyde Pierce is clearly having a hoot as the oddball inconvenienced by Crawford’s home invasion. Watching the two feel each other out and then struggle for power, all while Pierce hosts a dinner party in his mind, is a decent way to pass the time. It’s different without being particularly original. It’s technically competent even if it never feels like everything is really clicking. It’s entertaining, but not engaging.

Then, in the third act, Tomnay abruptly switches gears. Crawford’s flashbacks, which early on just seemed like a cheap way to get the audience on his side (for the record, I’ve never needed a good reason to sympathize with bank robbers who don’t hurt people), come to the forefront as The Perfect Host shifts from horror/thriller to a “who’s gonna end up with the money?” caper. Things go completely off the rails with the out of left field revelation that Pierce is not only some sort of make-up artist/torturer, but also a police lieutenant. It’s preposterous.

This is a movie crammed with ideas. They’re not particularly good ideas, but The Perfect Host combines elements I’ve never seen together. Unfortunately, they’re all so disparate and derivative that I wonder if this movie ever could have worked. Would the late plot twists play better if they had been set up and hinted at earlier? Would the tonal shift be less jarring if it came earlier or if I were more invested in the proceedings? Is there any way to make these pieces fit together? I’d like to think so, but Tomnay’s effort feels so ill conceived that I have serious doubts.

Pool party!

Jeff Hart:  I wouldn’t say that The Perfect Host is crammed with ideas so much as that it is crammed with twists. And, unfortunately, they’re all twists shamelessly cribbed from other films, and their nonsensical combination does not produce a coherent final product. Jeremiah asks if there’s a way to fit these pieces together. There isn’t. There are far too many pieces.

The only redeeming quality in Perfect Host is David Hyde Pierce. His performance is menacingly kooky and carries the first half of the film – the decent half, basically. As an overly polite, obsessively clean, schizophrenic serial killer, Pierce is a perfect choice. His cohort, Crawford, never really finds his character – a short-tempered robber with a heart-of-gold is, I guess, what we’re supposed to take away from his performance, but he’s mostly just in scenes to reflect Pierce’s craziness. Had Perfect Host stuck to what worked – Pierce being weird, Crawford trying to escape – this might have made a decent thriller. Those pieces fit together. But they are, apparently, too simplistic for Tomnay.

We eventually find out that Pierce isn’t necessarily as crazy as he seems (or at least, not as murderous), he just likes playing with make-up effects, presumably running a private scared straight program for home invaders. Which sort of makes sense, because Pierce is also a high-ranking police officer. Oh, and Crawford’s sick girlfriend isn’t actually sick, she’s just a con-artist (as if anyone gives a shit about her).

And just to unnecessarily quibble with what is ultimately an exercise in excessive twists unworthy of thought; the film ends with Pierce inviting his cop pal, who is onto him, over for dinner. This is supposed to seem menacing, as if Pierce and his posse of imaginary friends will gruesomely dispatch this cop following a bottle of poisoned wine. Except, three twists ago, we found out that Pierce doesn’t actually kill people. He’s totally harmless. Even the swords hanging over his mantle are fakes.

Hilariously, all of these half-baked revelations are intercut with an extended chess metaphor, as if Tomnay is patting himself on the back for what a clever film he’s made. The Perfect Host isn’t chess. It’s more like cinematic Calvinball.