Landing in Lahore, Pakistan, after a long flight from London, Jay (Dev Patel) rents a car and navigates through swarming motorbikes, honking cars and those fantastically painted trucks that travel the roads of South Asia. Stopping only to eat alone at a roadside and study a road map, he drives on as night breaks into morning, circling along the twisted highway for the dust-colored mountains. He rents another car, buys a pair of handguns and continues on to a walled, guarded compound where a wedding is about to occur.
The Wedding Guest is the latest by British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, a director whose remarkably varied oeuvre encompasses ironic comedy (The Trip), pop culture memoir (24 Hour Party People) and provocative documentary (The Shock Doctrine). The guest, Jay, is uninvited and unwanted. Scaling a wall, he sneaks into the compound by night, slipping through the darkened house past snoring shadows and into the bedroom where the bride, Samira (Radhika Apte), sleeps in bed with two other women. Jay knows exactly what he’s doing. Putting a gun to Samira’s head, he promises to kill her if she screams. On the way out of the compound, he’s forced to kill a guard.
Samira isn’t happy with the rough stuff—Jay bundles her gagged and tied into his car trunk—but is half-relieved to be stolen from her unwanted groom in a painfully arranged marriage. Jay had been hired by her boyfriend, but that’s not where the story ends.
A sultry thriller, The Wedding Guest hurries with swift efficiency from Pakistan to India, traveling up and down the length of the latter country with police on alert and Samira’s picture in all the papers. Finding his job more complicated than expected, Jay descends into a labyrinth of duplicity, distrust and romance. The Wedding Guest is like a B film noir set under the blazing subcontinental sun but infused with art-house melancholy. Hollywood endings are allusive.
