Variety's Jessica Kiang has published a highly positive review of "The Guest," the debut feature from Danish director Mads Mengel, which screened at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The film is praised as an "impressively uncozy" Nordic drama that begins as a comedy of bourgeois social awkwardness before deepening into a tragedy about how a mother's psychological frailty affects her adult children. The review singles out Trine Dyrholm's lead performance as a restrained yet volatile force that lifts the film above its softer contemporaries.

The story unfolds at a plush seaside hotel during a secular naming party for the newborn son of Karl (Simon Bennebjerg) and Emilie (Mette Klakstein Wiberg). The celebration is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Karl's estranged, mentally unstable mother Vibeke (Dyrholm), whom his sister Rikke (Josephine Park) had quietly invited. As Vibeke grows more erratic, the siblings weigh drastic measures to calm her, while Mengel and co-writer Christian Bengtson refuse to play her instability for laughs, opting instead for an earnest, melancholic tone. Kiang commends the film's clean-lined cinematography by David Bauer and Dyrholm's ability to make Vibeke sympathetic yet impossible to root for.