The Guest Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
This exciting, if far-fetched four-part BBC thriller played out almost like a crazed version of “My Fair Lady’. Gabrielle Creevy is Ria, a poor, down-on-her-luck domestic cleaner with a deadbeat boyfriend. She’s so low, she stoops to stealing from a supermarket charity bay but is caught in the act. When an obviously wealthy and perfectly coiffured female witness seems to take pity on her and offer her a well-paid job cleaning her country mansion, it seems as if the girl’s luck has changed. Her new boss Fran, played by Eve Myles, takes to her, confiding in her and offering her new protegé advice in her love life, to the extent of encouraging her to ditch her live-in lover and right-swipe her way to an upgrade on a dating site.
Sure enough, a handsome hunk replies to her but when they meet up and he ritually bigs himself up, she feels obliged to do the same and so, conveniently adopts Fran’s persona for the night. Encouraged by Fran, she arranges a follow-up date and when Fran has to go away for the night, Ria, who’s coincidentally been asked to stay over to look after the property, invites her new lover boy to come over. But her dream date turns into a nightmare when the guy sees through her role-playing, his drink and cocaine-fuelled taunting leading to a frantic chase, up down and around the house, which it’s fair to say, ends badly for him. And then, wouldn’t you know it, Fran turns up unexpectedly on the scene of carnage but rather than call the cops, she instead helps to cover up for Ria.
From there, it escalates more than the elevator in the Burj Khalifa, Ria getting drawn into Fran’s world to the extent of moving into the guest house on her estate and also becoming her PA. But how can she still be getting text messages from the man she saw fall to his death? What is the tie-in with Fran’s estate manager – lover (Emun Elliott) especially when her slightly creepy, domineering husband (Julian Lewis Jones) returns home from abroad? And just who is or was Anna, another financially and emotionally dependent young girl who seems to have gone through the exact same process with Fran but has now mysteriously disappeared?
I’ll be honest and say that there were quite a few things in this programme which just didn’t add up, but it was certainly suspenseful and exciting all the way through regardless of how incredible it all seemed. No matter how fantastical and even ridiculous were all the plot twists and turns, especially when it was piling on the cliffhangers, it was held together by the taut direction and conviction acting of all the principals, with my wife and I cheering Ria’s resourcefulness throughout, which eventually saw her handsomely rewarded right at the end. You shall go to the ball, Ria!
Escapist entertainment it may well have been, but sustained by its high production values, it certainly kept me on or near the edge of my sofa throughout.
