You may think that you don’t want to be reminded of your worst Christmas or other family nightmares. But when watching The Guest, Danish director Mads Mengel’s debut feature film, you won’t be able to look away. Trust me! It’s a bit like stopping to catch a glimpse of the site of a traffic accident, just much more intriguing! And you will likely find yourself switching allegiance and changing your views on most of its characters more than once or twice.
The ensemble that brings to life The Guest (Gæsten), which world premieres on Sunday, July 5 in the main competition program of the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), reads like a who’s who of Danish acting. Trine Dyrholm (The Girl With the Needle, Poison) is Vibeke, the “guest” mentioned in the movie’s title. There’s just one problem: the estranged mother is not really invited to the baptism of the baby of her son Karl, portrayed by Simon Bennebjerg (The Pact, Promised Land) and his partner Emilie (Mette Klakstein). The celebration, taking place in a seaside resort where they plan to unveil their child’s name to the family, is supposed to be fun after all. And Karl, unlike his sister Rikke, played by Josephine Park (The Nurse, Oxen), hasn’t had contact with Vibeke for years.
Mengel wrote the script for the cinematic exploration of family, love, forgiveness and mental health with his friend and creative partner Christian Bengtson. “For me, the general theme is about forgiveness and family and looking at your past in a different light,” Mengel tells THR. He approaches forgiveness not as duty but as “transformation.”
The cinematographer on the film was David Bauer, while editing was handled by Louis Emil Ramm Seeberg. The film was produced by Victor Cunha’s Monolit Film. LevelK is handling sales.
Mengel, who has directed such drama series as My Different Ways and Supplex, and his creative collaborators will bring The Guest to the Czech spa town as the first Danish film picked for Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe Competition since 2015.
“Building on the tradition of contemporary Nordic cinema, debut filmmaker Mads Mengel tells the intimate story of a family that threatens to fall apart when old wounds are opened up,” teases the KVIFF website. “What begins as a close-knit celebration turns into an uncomfortable confrontation with an unresolved past that won’t let the film’s protagonists forget who they really are – or where they come from.”
Family, or the absence of family, is something everyone knows and has tricky experiences with, which made it appealing to the director. “Family is complex. Almost everybody feels this way, and when you meet someone who doesn’t and says ‘it’s easy with my family,’ I’m like, ‘Enjoy your time in heaven!’” Mengel tells THR.
“On one hand, family can be filled with conflict, sorrow, disappointment and expectations, and so on. But it’s also where the heart is, where you belong, a place of comfort in some way, even if it’s not always comfortable,” he adds. “You still have a longing and an urge to be with your family. And what makes it so interesting and so dynamic is that, whether in a sibling relationship or in a modern-son relation, it can go from a deeply trustworthy and loving place to unsettling and sad within a minute. These two extremes are very close together, and I think that’s what makes family so interesting for films and art.”
The Guest does indeed feel like an emotional rollercoaster ride. But its stars say the difficult and tense scenes were easier to shoot given the great chemistry among the cast and the comfortable and creative atmosphere created by director Mengel. “We had the trust that allows you to explore characters and let them surprise you,” explains Dyrholm. “It was just a dream team, which made it easier to do intense scenes,” Park similarly tells THR. “I couldn’t imagine better playmates.”
Bennebjerg echoes that. “Denmark is a small country, and acting is a small world,” he says. “I have played with Trine before, which is a real joy. But I had never played with Josephine before, which was a gigantic pleasure.”
Pulling off all the ambiguity and conflicting emotions can’t have been easy. “It was very intense, but also very fun,” offers Dyrholm. “We had a lot of pretty tough scenes, but some of them we had a lot of fun doing together, because the ensemble is just amazing, and the team was such a joy. From the first ‘action,’ it was just 100 percent no vanity.”
The cast and director all use the word “nuanced” to describe how they wanted to portray family relationships, trauma and mental health challenges.
“For all of us, it was very important to make The Guest nuanced, not ‘just’ make a film about mental illness or mental struggles,” Dyrholm tells THR. “We wanted to make a film about family relationships and how complicated it can all be to be in these relations that we are born into. And when you start a new family, as Karl is doing in the film, you start questioning where you come from and what you carry and what kind of values you have and all these issues and topics that are part of the film.”
Adds Mengel: “Mental illness in a family or in a close relationship does change things and does put everything we talk about right on the edge and dial it up a notch. But it was important for us that it was not only a film about mental illness. And it was a goal for me and all of us quite early on that there should be no heroes and there should be no villains. You should feel sympathy for all of them at one point or another, and if you change your views on the characters from scene to scene, I think the film is succeeding. We should love and hate them at different times in the film.”
The cast, of course, knew that experience of family as heaven, hell and somewhere in between. “For me, it’s a movie about family dynamics, and it was so much fun to act in, because in your family, you experience the widest range of emotions,” Park offers. “It’s where you love the most, it’s where you hate the most, it’s where you are the most frustrated. So the arena that you play in itself is so wonderful.”
The creative team put much prep into The Guest to develop the characters ahead of time to then have the freedom to let them loose on set. “We had all the discussions about the characters in the script room, so we could just spend the time on set shooting and trying out things,” shares Dyrholm.
That mix of prep and improvising final things on set also worked well for other cast members. “We had a couple of meetings with the closest cast, where we spoke about the dynamic between the people and the relations, and some people also shared what they imagined could have happened in the past,” recalls Bennebjerg. “It did not always align and was vague, but this definitely was something for all of us to remember during filming – that there are mountains of stories behind these two days we see in the film.”
In the “extremely generous, extremely safe” space of the set, the actors and their characters surprised each other. For example, Park recalls that “Trine just kept on surprising me. She yelled at me, and then she like went back. And Simon did the same. I felt like we could surprise each other to create those relationships where it isn’t about good and bad, or who’s right and who’s wrong.”
That contributed to the complexity and layers that all actors laud about The Guest. “It doesn’t shame anyone,” emphasizes Bennebjerg. “It’s not about, ‘We all know it’s her fault, or his. It’s a very humane movie.”
For example, Dyrholm’s Vibeke may have toxic sides, but she “is also the funniest and the freest character,” the actor adds. “So, she also represents this fun and freedom that Karl has likely suppressed. It’s so nuanced! I really love that and playing those [opposing] emotions of being fascinated by her at the same time as thinking, ‘Are you going to fuck this up?’”
All stars also laud the strong script, the sure-footedness of director Mengel and his willingness to listen to the actors and allow them to improvise. “Of course, the most important thing is to have a very good script and a great ensemble, which we had in this case,” Dyrholm tells THR. “And I’m very, very impressed by the director. It’s his first feature film.”
Bennebjerg calls him “a really precise director, and he really loves actors. He’s not afraid of actors and wants to find out what we feel in a scene and then do more takes, where it almost becomes theater.” Adds Park: “As an actor, you want to feel seen, and Mads is so good at seeing small things and movements, so you feel recognized and on the right track. And he’ll say: ‘Please keep doing this, and can you maybe make it a bit more or bigger?’”
The script also drew in the actors. “I really connected with the script the first time I read it,” Bennebjerg tells THR. “And I was lucky to be let into the script room quite a few times before the final draft. Not that I had many notes, but I could talk with Mads and Christian about it. And then I had meetings with Mads and this day when we went through the entire script. We spent eight hours talking about every scene.”
The cast says director Mengel brings together technical and interpersonal skills, with the willingness to give his cast the space to explore. “He is very skilled with working with actors, and he’s very brave,” explains Dyrhold. “He knows exactly the story he wants to tell, but he is very interested in the human way of telling it, so all the nuances and all he can get here and now during the shoot from actors, he’s very open to. I just really enjoyed working with him.”
Each actor approached their character somewhat differently. “I had this thing about Karl being physical,” Bennebjerg shares with THR. “I wanted him to be falling and as a result having a lot of movement and expression – he is making big faces, he is touching his face a lot, being stressed out, rubbing his eyeballs.”
One small fashion or design choice helped the actor with that. “The glasses helped me a lot,” Bennebjerg explains. “In real life, I don’t wear glasses. So having this alien thing in my face allowed me to take them off and put them on again. I wanted to work with that ‘bridge.’”
His goal was to ensure that Karl, and audiences’ opinions of him, could evolve as The Guest unfolds. ”I wanted to make him calm and controlled in the beginning – this is a man who can really hold his shit together,” Bennebjerg tells THR. “And then, the worst thing that can happen to him happens, and he just goes up in flames.”
Rikke is most like an underdog of the family. Speaking of dogs, Rikke has one, and Park shares that the casting of this dog was a lucky coincidence. “We were talking about what if she had a dog, because she wants to be loved,” she tells THR. “But what we didn’t know was that this dog that came to set is a kind of dog that doesn’t like humans. But it was such a gift and became a thing. Not even her own dog likes her or wants to be around her.”
Meanwhile, Dyrholm focused on exploring the different dimensions of Vibeke. “For me, it was very important that we understand her and how she struggled back then when she got kids at a very young age, raising them as well as she could,” the star explains. “On the other hand, she has mental health issues and some challenges that she is fighting against while she just wants to be close to her kids. She’s longing to be part of the family again, and all these issues we can all relate to.”
That meant making sure to show Vibeke’s light and dark sides. “It was very important to make her fun and human, so you can see that you want to be close to her,” Dyrholm tells THR. “And on the other hand, something may be broken or not working in the normal sense. And so we are also questioning what it is to be normal.”
Adding to the authenticity, grittiness and realness of The Guest is the fact that some of the past between the characters gets hinted at but not always spelled out. The story also has no flashbacks. “Our rule was also that two characters weren’t allowed to say something to each other that both characters would obviously know,” explains Mengel. “They always had to talk to each other like you would do in real life. We didn’t want someone to walk in and say, ‘Oh, hello, sister, I haven’t seen you in five years, nice to see you again,’ because noone would talk like that in real life. So, what the characters have been through in the past had to come through in the way they were interacting. That made the writing process a bit more difficult, but I think the result is so much more rewarding, and it takes the characters seriously.”
The creative team can’t wait to premiere The Guest and bring their team effort to the world. “Everybody always says this, but I loved my team on this project, and the actors are amazing. It was a delight, and what makes this film special is the actors’ performances,” Mengel offers. “They made me look really good. They are really smart actors and smart human beings, and they were wonderful to work with. So I’m very grateful.”
And Dyrholm tells THR: “I was very impressed when I saw the final film by how emotional it is. I feel that it succeeds in being a universal story that we can all relate to. My character has mental issues, some illness that she’s dealing with, but it was very important for the director not to make a film only about that, but also more broadly about families, relations, love, how we cope with love, how we cope with being the new father and parent and how you start reflecting on your own legacy.”
The creative team’s hope is that audiences of The Guest will recognize themselves and their loved ones and take something away from the film. For Mengel, one of those things is the importance of forgiveness. “Two and a half years ago I became a father myself, and it changed my perspective on life, as it does for many people. I started to maybe look at some things in a different way,” he shares with THR. “I think, both in family and in many relationships, forgiveness is important, if you can find it in yourself.”
Park describes her character’s relationship with her brother as evolving along those lines as the film unfolds. “There is a beautiful journey,” she says. “Karl learns to step in more, because he has not had a relationship with his mother for years, while my character needs to learn to step out of it a bit.”
Concludes Mengel: “If you’re not able to forgive, you end up getting locked in a mental prison of the past. Forgiveness is a way to set yourself free and grow in many ways.”