The Guest review: This study of money and power in thriller threads is a welcome guest for the autumn
You start out thinking that the BBC's new thriller The Guest (BBC1, Mon, 9pm) could be an examination of the increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots during our never-ending cost of living crisis.
A young woman is fired from her cleaning job for refusing to take a below minimum wage pay-cut, while a glossy woman swans around a mansion as her husband complains they are no clean cups.
So far, so Ken Loach, but The Guest quickly takes a sudden detour down twist-of-fate lane and the first episode ends in murder and mayhem avenue.
Ria, the penniless cleaner (Gabrielle Creevy), is spotted taking a packet from a local supermarket's food donation point and is immediately accosted by a security guard and accused of shoplifting.
Her logical response that it can't be shoplifting as it's already been paid for cuts no ice and she is ejected from the store, but fortunately the entire exchange has been witnessed by Fran (Eve Myles), the glossy woman with no coffee mugs.
Fran offers Ria a chance to win a cleaning job at her country mansion, and soon she is loaning her a dress and a chunky necklace and buying her sushi for lunch.
On the basis of the first episode, it's difficult to work out Fran's motives. Is this a Pygmalion story, where Fran moulds Ria into an middle class woman? Does she see herself in Ria and want to offer her a helping hand?
Or is there something more sinister going on here? After all, The Guest borrows some familiar tropes from horror.
The electric gates at Fran's mansion clang ominously shut behind Ria as she arrives for her first day; Fran owns a black cat; there a mysterious people peeping out from behind curtains; a locked room that Fran's husband doesn't like people entering; and an ominous warning from a grizzled older gardener - “get out while you can”.
There are also interesting power dynamics at play here.
Ria's friend Sharla encourages her to aim higher, to dump her loser boyfriend Lee - “he's never going to give you what you want” - and to get out and away from her dead-end life.
Ria laughs it off, and goes back to the squat she shares with Lee to watch him play video games and evade questions about job applications.
But it just takes Fran saying the same thing – in her expensively-tailored clothes, at the desk of her home office, her hair coiffed just so – for Ria to start paying attention.
“You're too busy being grateful for the crumbs,” Fran tells Ria, “take the f***ing cake.”
You get the impression that Fran has been taking various people's Victoria sponges for years, and it's not long before Ria is off on illicit dates, borrowing dresses and jewellery and getting a taste for the finer things in life.
So there's twist-of-fate lane, and we arrive at murder and mayhem avenue when Ria invites her new beau back to Fran's house, where she is looking after the cat while Fran is away.
And from a study of power and authority, we head off in a totally new direction
It's all a bit silly, but it's built so nicely and runs along so smoothly that you buy it absolutely and by the end of the first episode, with bodies on the floor, bloodstains on the walls and shattered chandeliers on the parquet, you're grinning widely to yourself and moving on to the next episode.
There is still a study of class, power and money here, but it comes clothed in psychological horror threads, jump scares and all, and it makes for much more welcome guest.