A.V. Club says The Perfect Host is a “fun kind of ridiculous”

The great A.V. Club, audiovisual offshoot to The Onion, has just posted two new reviews of The Perfect Host by bloggers Nathan Rabin and Noel Murray. While they feel, like a lot of early reviews, that the movie has perhaps a twist too far, they agree that David is pretty fun to watch.

Noel Murray: One summer I got hooked on the movie Deathtrap and watched it about a dozen times on HBO, enjoying all the twists and turns of its plot about two men with secrets, each trying to kill the other. Writer-director Nick Tomnay’s debut feature The Perfect Host isn’t as good as Deathtrap, but I enjoyed it for much the same reasons: it makes good use of a limited set and characters, and it keeps introducing new surprises. Clayne Crawford plays a bank robber who’s looking for a place to lay low, and cons his way into the home of dapper aesthete David Hyde Pierce. But Pierce, as it turns out, is more than a little nuts, and before long it’s impossible to say who’s really in control of the situation. Tomnay introduces flashbacks to fill in the blanks of Crawford’s story, and he introduces a left-field twist about Pierce in the last 15 minutes that brings the various threads of the movie together in a fairly ridiculous way. But it’s a fun kind of ridiculous, and Pierce plays his wacked-out dinner party host with such gusto that it almost doesn’t matter if all the characters are cartoons. Grade: C+

Nathan Rabin: In my Better Late Than Never piece on the first season of The Wire I singled out movies and television shows that use chess as an easy and ubiquitous metaphor as one of my pet peeves. So I wasn’t terribly surprised when a chessboard pops up in the pulpy black comic thriller The Perfect Host to convey that the film’s two leads, a bank robber on the run (Clayne Crawford) and a seemingly milquetoast fop played by David Hyde Pierce are engaged in a chess-like battle of wits. A film that feels unmistakably like a night out at an Off-Broadway theater, the claustrophobic, theatrical thriller finds Crawford’s handsome crook hiding out in the home of a seemingly innocuous stranger (Pierce) preparing for an elaborate dinner party. Crawford isn’t able to maintain the fiction that he’s a friend of Pierce’s friend for very long, leading to a series of twists and reversals. The film’s main draw is the novelty of seeing the eternally typecast Pierce—who is perhaps too busy cashing Frasier royalty checks to take on many lead roles—cycle through radically different personas as his shape-shifting character mutates dramatically every half-hour or so. Pierce is clearly having a ball but this gimmicky, superficial exercise in audience manipulation is unpredictable in an awfully predictable way. Grade: C