The Guest (2014)

Dan Stevens is a national treasure. Not ours, but I still love him. After charming our pants off in Downton Abbey, he played against type as an unnerving Afghanistan war veteran who arrives back stateside in a small town to wrap up some unfinished business in 2014’s The Guest. I haven’t seen anything else its director, Adam Wingard, or its writer, Simon Barrett, have made, but The Guest has become an almost annual Halloween watch for me. It’s incredibly low-stakes but also very unsettling, mixing some ‘80s B-horror movie vibes with the stomach-churning dread of all those post-9/11 war crimes stalking your conscience just off screen.

Stevens perfectly sells his performance as the war buddy of a family’s dead army son that teaches them to live, laugh, and love. Think Black Mirror meets Napoleon Dynamite with a stiff-upper lip Brit at the center of it. I showed it to my parents and they hated it, so it has that going for it too. — Ethan Gach