Back in 2018, I fleetingly remember watching the trailer of The Wedding Guest, a film written and directed by Michael Winterbottom (A Mighty Heart, Jude) that seemed to have fallen into the cracks after its release, only to resurface at the second spot on Netflix’s movie charts this week.

The Wedding Guest stars Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire), who at the time was in the midst of his stride of intense drama movies such as Lion and The Man Who Knew Infinity — films that would ultimately get him to a place where he desperately needed a John Wick-ish film (i.e. The Monkey Man, out now in cinemas) to his credit, so that Hollywood would take him seriously in more commercial roles.

The origins of his present-day, action-oriented acting role (which he also directs) starts with this Winterbottom movie, where he also gets a producer’s credit.

Patel plays a young man with a British accent and no name, whose suitcase is stacked with a number of ready-to-use aliases that he employs during regular pit-stops from London to Younganabad, a small town in the Nankana Sahib District near Faisalabad, Pakistan. There, he plans to kidnap Samira (Radhika Apte), a young bride-to-be, in the dead of the night and transport her across the border to India, so that she and her lover Deepesh (Jim Sharbh) can disappear within the 1.4 billion thick populace of the country.

Director Michael Winter bottom’s The Wedding Guest is a simple film that carries a visual novel aesthetic

The Wedding Guest is a simple film that carries a visual novel aesthetic; with its hour-and-a-half runtime, it moves with the detailed, descriptive pace of a thriller novel. The visuals almost seem like the words one reads in a book.

As it happens in novels (well, not all novels), the actions of the characters and vividness of the descriptions outweigh the dialogues (the latter is delivered through near-perfect production design that has few noticeable slip-ups in the Pakistan-segment).

Despite the deliberate directorial call to employ fewer lines of dialogues, one can still hear what the characters are saying in their moments of silence. Mind you, what they are saying isn’t really that deep.

Winterbottom deliberately keeps the story straightforward and ambiguous, and forces his actors to play their parts with the same troubled emphasis.

Patel, with his all-pervasive look of intense tension, pushes his character’s unexplained burdened backstory on to us in every frame. Sharbh, although a small entry, doesn’t need much screen time to illustrate that his character is a bit of a self-serving weasel. Apte, meanwhile, spends almost no time telling us that her character, irrespective of being caught in the middle of desperate circumstances, is just as self-serving and untrustworthy. As actors, the three do their jobs quite well.

Of the three, only Patel’s character is capable of touching the viewers. His desperation for money hints that Deepak has exploited a young man who is caught between a rock and a hard place, while his cool, meticulous, unentangled senses tell us that he has probably pulled off similar crimes in the past.

Winterbottom’s forced perspective on his characters limits the depth of the narrative; but then again, given the tone of the film, the writer-director seemingly only wanted to make a film with a simple plot that had a distinctive, gritty and unconventional look that would hard-sell the thriller aspect of the story.

Although interesting, the film is exactly that: a hard sell. The experience would have been much more rewarding if there was more to the plot than ambiguity.

Streaming on Netflix, The Wedding Guest is rated R for nudity; given that Pakistani audiences are mostly into Bollywood wares or sexualised content, perhaps that is why it is on the number 2 spot on Netflix

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 21st, 2024