If you’ve been fortunate enough to avoid the promos, this film opens with a lone man jogging down a highway early one morning and arriving at the home of a family who have recently had a son, Caleb, die in service in Afghanistan. He introduces himself as David, (Dan Stevens) a comrade of Caleb’s who is fulfilling his friend’s dying wish to check that his family are doing alright. There’s little point in pretending that this isn’t Dan Stevens’ film. The British star is best known on either side of the Atlantic as Downton Abbey‘s Matthew Crawley, but whatever Wingard saw in him to suggest the work he puts in here, it pays off spectacularly. The film has a similar sort of vibe to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, building the atmosphere of a 1980s straight-to-video flick, taking its sweet time to get going and centring the action on a polite, super-competent young man with hidden depths. Comparisons to Ryan Gosling wouldn’t go wide of the mark, but there’s an electrifying intensity in David that is entirely Stevens’ own. As in Wingard’s You’re Next, another subversive genre flick that made a big splash when it was finally unleashed from the shelf this time last year, Stevens is surrounded by a cast of relative unknowns, featuring Monroe and Meyer as revelations in their own right. Their characters are troubled by their respective social circles, but each find their resourcefulness coaxed out by David’s presence in different ways. They each play a big part in keeping things level before all hell breaks loose, which actually takes a surprisingly long time. It’s Lance Reddick’s Carver who precipitates the turnaround, bringing more dread into the already foreboding atmosphere as he draws ever closer to David. That’s the stuff that makes The Guest feel like an instant cult classic, but Wingard’s accomplishment here is in suffusing the whole film with that atmosphere and holding back the theatrics until the characters have been well established. Delivered straight-up and without compromise, The Guest may be the best genre movie of the year. The only trouble we’d have in declaring it so, is in telling you which genre it actually is. However Netflix ends up classifying it In the future, Wingard manages it all masterfully, delivering another subversive and unpredictable exploitation flick that makes an instant star of Dan Stevens. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.