The Cutprice Guignol

As much as I talk a big game about the importance of authentic, nuanced, and well-written female representation in media, sometimes all I want is a horrible, toxic, utterly unrealistic, and vaguely homoerotic bit of girl-on-girl nastiness.

Which is where my trash TV of the month, The Guest, comes in. Anyone who’s been around these parts for the last few years will know that I consider myself (amongst many other things) perhaps the most passionate connoisseur of trash television in all the nonspecific land, so when I heard talk of The Guest, a new thriller (or should I say, thrill-her) starring Eve Myles (of Torchwood infamy) and Gabrielle Creevy, you had better believe that I was cancelling the few plans I had to binge it in a single afternoon.

The Guest follows Ria (Creevy), a down-on-her-luck jobbing cleaner trying to scrape by on shite pay and what she can rescue from the food donation bin at Sainsbury’s, after she’s hired as a housekeeper by Fran (Myles), an accomplished, confident, and charismatic woman with a very respectable amount of questionable business dealings and extra-marital affairs on which to hang her hat.

And let’s get straight to it: it’s the relationship between Ria and Fran that got me through these four ridiculous episodes of convolution, murder, and miscellaneous mayhem. There’s a reason that so many great stories about overly-intimate interpersonal relationships between women have a household staff angle (The Handmaiden, for example) – there’s something so decidedly intimate about allowing someone into your life like that, into your space, the parts of you that are reserved only for the people closest. And Myles makes the most of that, chomping through the scenery in every single shot, everything about her so weirdly, compellingly seductive – call me predictable, but I have a huge soft spot for the mutually assured destruction homoerotic female friendship as a genre (case in point), and this is an outrageously and unashamedly fun take on that.

The way Fran dresses Ria up, moulds her into the shape of the person she thinks Ria should want to be, masterminds her sexual relationships as she drapes her abject manipulation in the veil of girlbossery – it’s pure sapphic toxicity, even if they never actually get down to business with one another. But what’s sex when you have a charged scene of applying lipstick, you know? Shit, I wrote a whole book about it!

Even aside from Myles and her perma-blowout, The Guest knows exactly what kind of show it is and embraces that entirely. Creevy brings a believably mundane miserableness to Ria’s life pre-Fran, and writer Matthew Barry has a lightness of touch with this script that never lets it take itself too seriously (and tosses in a few bangers to boot – I mean, referring to bisexuality as lending a hand on a busy night? I yelped). The Cardiff setting, while not exactly a go-to for a glossy thriller like this, makes for an interesting and surprising gorgeous backdrop (and marks the second of my favourite shows this year that happen to be set in Wales, which I’ve decided has to mean something).

The Guest is a scrumptious bit of nonsense that leaves nothing on the plate – a silly, indulgent, and extraordinarily fun bit of femmes fataling to get the mystery season kicked off right. I’d love to hear what you made of it below, and, if you have any other recommendations in the same vein, let me know in the comments!

If you enjoyed this post and want to see more stuff like it, please consider checking out my other woman-centric recaps – , Sex and the City and Carrie are good places to start! Please also have a look at my fiction work, such as my short story collection, Misandry. And you can always support me on Patreon for access to exclusive blog posts!

(header image via BBC)