Only David Thewlis’s committed portrayal of a father haunted by the past saves Atom Egoyan’s strained tale of poisoned lives
David Thewlis stars here, and it is only the absolute conviction of his performance that saves this from being an utter misfire – a misfire of the sort that, sadly, the once great film-maker Atom Egoyan keeps on giving us. As it is, Guest of Honour is merely a bafflingly strained and unconvincing melodrama with some awful acting. It also has to be said that this has worrying echoes of Egoyan’s excruciating 2008 film Adoration in that both feature a teacher who gets her pupils into a really dangerous situation but never shows the smallest guilt, and behaves as if she is sorrowingly pained by other people’s moral failings.
Thewlis plays Jim, a
British expatriate in
Canada employed as a food inspector. His daughter, Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), is a
music teacher who is now in
prison for a sexual offence with teenage pupils that she did not commit (but deliberately gave every impression of committing) and confessed to it, supposedly because she wanted to punish herself for something else. That is related to her father’s apparent adulterous relationship with her own music teacher when she was a girl, a toxic memory that tragically poisoned her own relationship with this teacher’s son.