A Strange Guest: A dusty mystery that mostly just keeps you guessing

If you have a soft spot for grainy, old-fashioned murder mysteries that smell like mothballs and cigarettes, A Strange Guest might hit the spot. If you prefer your thrillers to have, you know, actual momentum, you might want to skip this one. It’s for the folks who like to count the suspects on their fingers and feel smart when they guess the detective early.

The whole thing kicks off with a blackmail plot that feels a bit thin. Then someone turns up dead in Paris, and suddenly the movie tries to get serious. It has that stiff, stage-play energy where people walk into rooms, say something ominous, and then exit through a door that definitely doesn't close all the way.

There is this one scene in the hotel lobby where the lighting is so weirdly dramatic it makes everyone look like they are about to confess to a crime they didn't even commit yet. I kept waiting for someone to trip over a rug, but they all managed to keep their dignity, somehow. 🕵️‍♂️

Honestly, the detective work here isn't going to give The Maltese Falcon a run for its money. It’s a bit clunky. You can tell the writers were more interested in the 'gotcha' moment at the end than actually making the investigation feel like a real process. It’s like watching someone solve a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are missing and they just painted over the gaps.

The pacing? It’s a bit of a crawl. There are long stretches of dialogue that seem to be there just to fill the silence, and I found myself staring at the background furniture more than the actors. The wallpaper in that hotel room is surprisingly distracting.

I guess if you’re a completionist for this era of cinema, you’ll watch it. But it doesn't have that spark that makes a mystery truly sticky. It’s just... there. Like a piece of art that’s been hanging in a hallway for fifty years that nobody really looks at anymore.

Still, watching it reminded me of other mysteries like Tangled Evidence, which at least had the decency to be a bit more playful with its own ridiculousness. This one takes itself a tad too seriously for a movie where the plot hinges on such flimsy coincidences.

Notes I scribbled down:

• That hat in the third scene is absolutely massive.
• The sound quality drops whenever they move to the left side of the screen.
• I’m pretty sure the detective is just guessing half the time.
• The ending feels like it was tacked on because they ran out of film stock.

It’s not a bad way to kill a rainy afternoon if you turn your brain down to 'low.' Just don't go in expecting a masterpiece.