The Perfect Host

Photo Gallery

• 
• 
• 

Cosmopolitan dinner host Warwick Wilson (David Hyde Pierce) is pouring a glass of white wine, chopping a mélange of colorful vegetables, and roasting a duck when the doorbell interrupts. In compliance with the modern décor of his Los Angeles home, Warwick approaches a video-imaging buzzer that in black and white reveals a handsome yet distraught twenty-something babbling on about a mutual acquaintance named Julia and how she had insisted he, John Taylor (Clayne Crawford), invite himself over because Warwick is just such a nice guy, and she thought they'd "hit it off". Well, Warwick proves to be as the title suggests, inviting John to stay for dinner. He might actually be a bit too accommodating, inviting a few more guests -- imaginary ones. As it turns out, the perfect host is a certified sociopath.

After a scuffle, John, a sadistic on-the-run bank robber (did I forget to mention that?), finds his woozy body imbibed with a concoction of alcoholic-tinged sedative. As he comes to, tied to a chair with hands bound behind his back, John is forced to play witness to his dinner host's mad, schizophrenic visions and insidious dinner chatter.

The Perfect Host may read like a bizarre train wreck of unfortunate circumstance piled on top of perverse, illogical fantasy and caught somewhere between psychological thriller and bemusing dark comedy. That's because it is. Tone is sacrificed for haphazard absurdism, and the narrative grows ever more irrational, without even a wink at the camera. In fact, writer-director-editor Nick Tomnay presents a movie so infatuated with twists and turns that as the ruse becomes ever more ludicrous you are never sure whether the film was meant to be a comedy -- albeit one with a long lead-up and no punch-line.

David Hyde Pierce nonetheless seems to be enjoying and reveling in the sadistic fun, mining his Broadway roots for broad comedy and twisted humor as though he were breaking the fourth wall and playing out to the audience, engaging in moments of comic bliss. He's phenomenally entertaining. But the rest of the cast remains stoic and bogged down by a directorial hand devoid of self-reflexivity. Think Clue (1985) but stripped entirely of comic and theatrical self-recognition. It's all so toneless, promising only by picture's end that the viewer will be left intoxicated by irritating numbness.