The Perfect Host (2010)

A 2010 psychological thriller about a bank robber who hides out in the home of a stranger preparing a dinner party, and discovers that his host is a police lieutenant with a scrapbook of past dinner parties featuring captive guests in increasing distress. David Hyde Pierce plays Warwick Wilson and Clayne Crawford plays John Taylor. The film is a two-hander that keeps reversing who is the predator and who is the prey until neither label fits.

What the film does

John Taylor (Clayne Crawford) is fleeing a bank robbery, wounded, when he talks his way into the home of Warwick Wilson (David Hyde Pierce), who is preparing a dinner party. John claims to have been mugged. He makes small talk and drinks wine while trying to figure out his next move. When the radio announces the robbery, John drops the act and reveals himself. He forces Warwick to cancel his guests and says he will kill him unless Warwick accommodates him until morning. Then John keels over. The wine was drugged. Warwick is not the person he seems.

When John regains consciousness, he is tied to a chair. The dinner party is in full swing, but all the other guests are figments of Warwick’s imagination. Warwick takes a Polaroid and shows John a scrapbook of his past dinner parties: captive guests arranged in a timeline of increasing distress and injury that ends in death. The imaginary guests are cleaned-up, respectable versions of the people in the album.

The night becomes a psychological game. John and Warwick play chess with John’s freedom as the prize. John wins and Warwick lets him go as agreed, but taunts him before he leaves. John stabs Warwick with a sword from the living room, but it proves to be a collapsible prop. John is knocked out. He regains consciousness in Warwick’s bathtub, where Warwick runs a blade across his throat.

John’s body is left outside with the trash. He awakens and discovers that most of his injuries are fake. Warwick is a master of movie makeup.

Detective Morton, who has been investigating the robbery, arrives at Warwick’s door. The film reveals that Warwick is a police lieutenant supervising the case. Meanwhile, John becomes suspicious of Simone, the bank teller he conspired with, and discovers she made alternate travel arrangements out of Los Angeles that do not include him. John confronts Simone in a parking garage over her betrayal. He had robbed the bank to pay for the medical treatment she had faked. He takes her car and the money, leaving her to be captured by the detectives.

Warwick stops John from leaving and takes the money at gunpoint, leaving him with a couple thousand dollars to flee to Mexico.

Months later, Detective Morton receives mail from Mexico, implied to be from John, containing a Polaroid of Warwick and John together at a dinner party. Morton confronts Warwick, who dismisses it as a fake. When Morton persists, Warwick invites him to a dinner party.

Why it’s in the canon

Criteria blend is 1+3, loved it and want to remember it. The film is a psychological thriller that runs on David Hyde Pierce playing against type. The actor built a career on Niles Crane, the fussy, fastidious, harmless character. Warwick Wilson is fussy and fastidious and not at all harmless. The film knows the audience brings that association and uses it. The dinner-party framing device is the right container for the game: the empty chairs, the imaginary guests, the scrapbook, the Polaroids. All of it is a performance and all of it is real, at the same time.

The film pairs with other psychological thrillers in the canon that are mostly one room and two actors and a game that keeps changing the rules.

A note on the title

The Letterboxd and Wikipedia pages both use the full title “The Perfect Host” (2010). The slug is the-perfect-host.

On hand

DVD only (no digital/download).