Whatever Adam Wingard is drinking, please keep ’em coming. The director’s most recent two features are uneven but brimming with nerve and invention: You’re Next (released here last year) upends the conventions of the home-invasion slasher movie and let viewers laugh through their gasps; and The Guest works increasingly daffy variations on the mysterious-stranger subgenre. In this case the stranger is an Afghanistan vet, David (Dan Stevens, a Downton Abbey refugee), who shows up at the front door of the Peterson home in Small Town, U.S.A. The Petersons have lost a son in battle, and David was with him at the end—indeed, David’s here looking in on the family because of a promise made at the hour of death. Or so he says. How many mysterious strangers can be trusted on such things?

We won’t give away the answer to that question, but Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett are clever at playing a certain kind of audience-engagement game. They know they’re working in a cheesy vein of ’80s-style storytelling. They know that we know that, too. So along with generating some creepy suspense and a handful of shock effects, they’re going to chuckle around the edges. It’s a tricky mix to get right, but for much of The Guest Wingard and Barrett hit a giddy note. Super-competent David wants to help the Petersons, to an alarming degree: He befriends adolescent Luke (Brendan Meyer) and stands down some bullies; he allows his hunkiness to bewitch teenage Anna (Maika Monroe); he instantly fulfills surrogate-son status for the dead man’s parents (Sheila Kelley and Leland Orser). The comic timing is right on, and the action scenes are potent.

Wingard may be a smartypants, and he pushes the movie’s climax over the top, but give him credit for getting a lot right. Casting, for one thing. The robotically handsome Stevens is ideal; Monroe looks like a future star; and Kelley and Orser are amusingly recognizable as early-’90s character actors. And the film’s subtext is going to look good 20 years from now, when people consider the pop culture spawned during the War on Terror. Whatever its surface fun, The Guest is also about what happens when you create a monster that spirals out of control. Opens Wed., Sept 17 at Pacific Place. Rated R. 99 minutes.

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