Atom Egoyan’s Guest of Honour (2019) is a film about repression, shame, rabbits, food inspection, and one very constipated father-daughter relationship—all stirred together like a melancholy stew and ladled out in lukewarm flashbacks. It wants to be a psychological drama. It wants to be a meditation on guilt and memory. What it ends up being is a tangle of half-baked subplots, unclear motivations, and prolonged scenes of people staring blankly while violins moan in the background like they’ve just read the script.
The story, as much as there is one, centers around Jim (David Thewlis), a food inspector whose idea of emotional connection is measuring fridge temperatures and silently judging sandwich tongs. He’s recently died—this is not a spoiler; it’s practically the first line of the movie—and his daughter Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), a former high school music teacher turned voluntary prison inmate, is meeting with a priest to discuss her father’s funeral arrangements. That conversation is the film’s framing device, which unfolds like a therapy session conducted by a priest who majored in listening and minored in looking bored.
From there, Egoyan does what Egoyan does best: fracture the timeline like it’s a dropped mirror and let the audience figure it out. We jump between Veronica’s prison time, Jim’s increasingly erratic food inspections, flashbacks to Veronica’s childhood, and snippets of a rabbit that may or may not be a metaphor for innocence, betrayal, or Egoyan’s attempt to make you feel something other than mild confusion.
Let’s start with Jim. David Thewlis is a talented actor, which makes it even more painful to watch him smothered by a script that asks him to emote like a malfunctioning fax machine. Jim is a sad, lonely man who responds to emotional distress by getting unnecessarily intense about health code violations. He busts into kitchens with a thermometer like a culinary Dirty Harry, scowling at sneeze guards and dreaming about… well, we’re never quite sure what he dreams about. He’s one of those characters who’s clearly haunted, but the film refuses to let us know by what—at least not until the very end, by which point you’ve already mentally checked out and started googling local buffet ratings.
Veronica, on the other hand, is even more inscrutable. She’s in prison, but not because she has to be—she wants to be. She’s been convicted of an inappropriate relationship with one of her teenage music students, but don’t worry, Egoyan spends a good chunk of the film soft-pedaling that detail so you can focus on her inner turmoil instead of the statutory stuff. Veronica insists on her guilt. She clings to her sentence like it’s a spiritual cleanse. Is she delusional? Noble? Masochistic? The movie never quite decides.
The dynamic between Jim and Veronica—arguably the emotional core of the film—is less “complicated father-daughter drama” and more “two emotionally cauterized robots trying to out-guilt each other.” Their conversations are heavy with metaphor and light on actual feeling. There’s one flashback where they have a meal together, and the tension is so thick it could be sliced with a rusty spatula. Except it never goes anywhere. Just cryptic stares, slow bites of undercooked character development, and muttered lines like, “You always knew.” Knew what, Atom?
And let’s not forget the food. There’s a lot of it. We see Jim visit greasy spoons, fine dining joints, and dimly lit kitchens where spaghetti is both served and scrutinized. Food is clearly meant to be symbolic here—maybe of control, maybe of contamination, maybe of the idea that nobody in this movie knows how to deal with their feelings unless they’re inspecting a pork chop. There’s even a scene involving a rabbit stew that is framed like a Shakespearean tragedy—but you’ll be too distracted by wondering what the hell is going on to care if the rabbit is supposed to represent innocence lost or just a protein source with dramatic potential.
Egoyan, once known for his delicate explorations of memory and trauma, seems trapped in his own greatest hits album here. The narrative is fragmented, not in a way that builds suspense, but in a way that feels like you’re assembling a jigsaw puzzle of beige wallpaper. Flashbacks bleed into dream sequences, dreams blur into half-hearted emotional revelations, and you’re left wondering if the movie’s ambiguity is intentional or if the editor just gave up.
Even the cinematography feels tired. The lighting is flat. The color palette is washed-out tan and trauma gray. The camera lingers on faces like it’s waiting for them to do something interesting—which they never do. It’s visually competent, sure, but there’s no life, no tension, no spark. Just endless medium shots of characters quietly suffering while piano music sighs softly in the distance like a therapist who’s stopped taking notes.
And then there’s the ending, which delivers a “reveal” so absurdly melodramatic it feels like it wandered in from a telenovela about tragic rabbits. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say it retroactively turns several characters’ actions from “emotionally murky” to “outright ludicrous.” It’s supposed to be devastating. It’s supposed to tie everything together. But really, it just makes you want to rewind the movie to see if there was ever a point where any of this made sense.
Egoyan seems so determined to withhold emotion, to submerge his characters in ambiguity, that he forgets to make them people. Jim and Veronica are not complex—they’re just vague. Their suffering isn’t resonant—it’s confusing. And the themes, which could’ve been about parental failure, institutional guilt, forgiveness, and identity, end up buried beneath layers of rabbit metaphors and food service policy.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 expired buffet items.
Watch it if you enjoy slow burns where the only thing that catches fire is your patience. Everyone else: skip the invitation. Guest of Honour is a dinner party of drama with no food, no warmth, and a host who left before the story even started.