However simple the plan, “The Wedding Guest” is a movie steeped in the traditions of film noir, and its narrative will become complicated very quickly. Winterbottom, who also wrote and co-produced the movie, creates a story about gorgeous people committing crimes and double-crossing each other, where no one is innocent, except maybe the poor guard who’s killed during Samira’s kidnapping. In one scene while on the lam in India, Samira mentions that she and Jay are on the run like Bonnie and Clyde, two wayward souls finding each other by crime and chance. There’s more than a hint of romance between the two.
However, “The Wedding Guest” is perhaps much closer in spirit to “Double Indemnity,” Billy Wilder’s twisted 1944 film noir about a conniving woman (Barbara Stanwyck) who entraps a poor dope (Fred MacMurray) in a scheme to kill her husband. Samira’s double nature is not apparent at first, and Apte so convincingly plays the victim, the character shift is almost too subtle. She’s trying to escape her family and an unwanted marriage, and Jay becomes her last ticket out from that situation. Later, she becomes more confident in winning over Jay’s trust, and she appears remorseless, actively flirting with the man hired to kidnap her. It’s a sleight of hand trick she plays very well.
Set in Pakistan and India, the movie adds an element of travel lust to the mix without addressing any of the thorny political issues currently roiling the neighboring countries. That isolation works because the fugitives are so isolated, they spend as much time as possible away from everyone else. Plus, Jay noticeably does not speak any of the local languages of the places they travel through within the two countries, relying instead that someone, somewhere will understand English. The various languages in the movie will sometimes go entirely untranslated, so the English speakers in the audience will only know what Jay knows.
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