The Guest Review
Director: Klych López and Israel Sánchez
Date Created: 2025-09-25 01:32
1.5
The Guest Review: Netflix Colombian series La Huésped, helmed by Klych López and Israel Sánchez, has a whopping 20 episodes of approximately 45 minutes each. Lina Uribe and Dario Vanegas created the series, and it stars Laura Londoño, Jason Day, Carmen Villalobos, Margarita Muñoz, Andrés Suárez, and Kami Zea as leads. The show aims to be a psychological thriller drama revolving around a broken marriage, a sudden visit from an old friend, and plenty of secrets that come flooding out as lives get out of control. On paper, that looks like everything a suspenseful blend of betrayal and obsession should. However, in practice, the series finds no success at delivering anything resembling that.
The Guest Review
When I first discovered that The Guest Series ran a total of 20 episodes, I went in expecting a juicy family drama with twists and turns galore until the very end. What we receive is just the reverse. The story, with a troubled marriage between Silvia and Lorenzo and the shocking introduction of Sonia, could’ve easily spanned half of the episodes. What we receive are each of the revelations painstakingly and slowly teased out, and then lateral plot directions that go nowhere. As a viewer, I often felt as though I sat with a stopwatch and awaited some dramatic moment to happen and then felt let down as the one major shock became foreseen or overly dramatic.
The season length itself becomes the series’s largest enemy. Twenty episodes of characters reliving the same mistakes and secrets adding up and up and up and going unrewarded are tiring as opposed to suspenseful. For a series that should’ve been compact and suspenseful, La Huesped comes off as overstuffed and discombobulated.
In a show like this one, where the plot could lag, good characters can save you. Too bad you cannot experience feelings of affection with Netflix’s The Guest. Silvia gets sympathetic at the beginning of the show, but her constant behaviour of opting to overlook danger alarms becomes exasperating. Then there’s Lorenzo as an untrustworthy husband or as a man struggling hard to protect his family. And Sonia, of course, the wildcard she’s also supposed to be, and a good character she could’ve become with more logic and feeling behind her acts.
Instead of coming across as complex, The Guest series characters feel empty and sometimes off-putting. They keep secrets, make terrible decisions, and seem to thrive on chaos. What needs to become a complex investigation of a mind becomes an obvious melodrama warped out of all shape.
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One of the very few high notes of this Colombian series The Guest, is that the actors do their best with what they’ve got. Carmen Villalobos as Sonia has bursts of intensity that suggest where the series might’ve gone if it went all out with her character’s obsessions. Laura Londoño as Silvia also shoulders the responsibility of her role and tries to balance both delicacy and toughness. Even good acting cannot redeem lousy plotting. If one doesn’t comprehend characters’ motivations or if their motivations are totally absurd, regardless of how good an actor portrays their role, the viewer still feels at a distance.
A show like this from Colombia needs sharp twists and shocking moments. Although there are a lot of dramatic plot twists but much of it feels forced. For instance, Sonia’s manipulations needed to be terrifying and were overstretched until they were no longer effective. Lying, spying, and arguing back and back and back become predictable, and the suspense becomes false and isn’t exhilarating.
The conclusion also doesn’t nicely tidy everything up. Rather than resolve everything with a flourish of dramatic closure, the show spirals out of control with guns blazin’, fire burnin’, and plot twists of mind-blowing proportions stacked one upon the next. By the series’ end, I wasn’t shocked or tearably devastated; I exhaled with relief because it was done.
For me, the biggest disappointment was that Netflix’s The Guest could neither quite make up its mind if it wished it to be a lean psychological suspense story, a dark family saga, or a mere guilty pleasure with alternate extremes of plot twists. What it turned out to be was a half-hearted try at all of the above and none of the above. It plodded along slowly and lethargically, characters were unlikeable at every possible juncture, and suspense lurked and felt contrived. Even where the script handled themes of treachery, of obsession, and of revenge, it went through it with no substance and no originality.
Worst of all, the series seems to operate under the assumption that a patient audience will endure almost 20 hours of repetitive patterns and unnatural behaviour as if the longer duration somehow infuses a depth of deeper meaning. If anything, it becomes unreadable.
Netflix The Guest Review: Summing Up
Overall, the 2025 Colombian series The Guest had a good cast, plotline, and production that could make a memorable show, but it wastes all with a tedious, perplexing, and frustrating plot. Being a lover of psychological dramas, I kept on waiting for the moment of eureka where everything would make sense — and it didn’t come. What I got was an abundance of characters that I could neither feel anything for, and plot twists that were more tiring than shocking.
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