His performance looks even worse against a fantastically odious Bonneville, smoothly sinking into the dark side of his well-established upper-crust nice-guy persona, taking it all rather seriously, even as things get rather silly. The 30-year-old actor is also not a believable 23-year-old, so the scenes of him sulking and railing against an ever-reliable Kelly Macdonald as his beleaguered mother (just 16 years his senior in real life), play a bit like sketch show exaggeration. MacKay, so believable as a plummy soldier entering hell in the film 1917, is less convincing at the other end of the class spectrum, with an affected accent and persona so jarringly misjudged, I almost questioned if that was the point (a brief aside from another character about others having less than him and what he thinks he has, suggested maybe, but if so, it needed another beat to work). We start by spending time with MacKay’s middle-finger-to-the-system rebel – a rather awkward piece of miscasting that sinks a great portion of the first act. The details are never particularly surprising, and it feels like a wallop of a twist short in the last act, but the structure and shifting protagonist upend expectations (even if the final shift borders on too many). But to the British-Iranian writer-director Babak Anvari’s credit, along with co-writer Namsi Khan, the film doesn’t play out exactly as we might expect given its forebears.
We’re in adjacent territory to other home-invaders-find-something-nasty thrillers such as The Collector, Don’t Breathe and most closely, Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs.
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