The Guest opens with a soldier named David (Dan Stevens) arriving at a New Mexico home to deliver a message to the mother of a dead soldier named Caleb. In his final moments, Caleb asked David to tell his family that he loves them, and the family responds to David’s kindness by taking him in. At first, David is a sweet, thoughtful young man, but he quickly shows a more sadistic side, and as the parents fall for his yes-ma’am routine, their daughter Anna (Maika Monroe) becomes suspicious of David’s murderous ways.

Make no mistake, The Guest is glorious, stinky cheese. The acting is pretty bad, the effects are simultaneously gory and chintzy, and the dialogue is about as on-the-nose as it can be. But it’s not campy, self-aware cheese like, say, Hobo with a Shotgun or the Machete films. Instead, it’s an earnest little low-budget horror/thriller, and it feels refreshing to watch a movie that isn’t poking us in the ribs all the time to clue us in to how very clever it’s being. Like director Adam Wingard’s last film, You’re Next, The Guest doesn’t try to provide a postmodern twist, or outsmart the viewer at every turn. It just wants to scare you and creep you out a little bit.

Two elements combine to elevate The Guest into delicious pulp: The killer synth-rock soundtrack, which evokes a 1980s John Carpenter–like tension, and Stevens’s performance as David. Without Stevens’s charisma holding the center of the film together, The Guest would be an abysmal failure. He sells David’s charm, menace, and insanity throughout the film by staying quiet and calm and centered. In a parallel universe, Stevens would make a fine cinematic Captain America, but instead he’s the center of a dumb, dirty slasher flick, and that perversion of what appears to be David’s intrinsic sense of duty is impossible to hate.