DIRECTOR: Jessica M. Thompson
CAST: Nathalie Emmanuel, Thomas Doherty, Hugh Skinner, Stephanie Corneliussen, Alana Boden, Elizabeth Counsell, Courtney Taylor, Jeremy Wheeler, Scott Alexander Young, Carol Ann Crawford, Virág Bárány, Sean Pertwee
RUNNING TIME: 105 mins
CERTIFICATE: 15
BASICALLY…: A young woman (Emmanuel) discovers new relatives with a gothic secret…
NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
Somewhere in an alternate universe, The Invitation was the direct result of brainless studio executives passing on too many nonsensical notes to the makers of Ready or Not. “Y’know,” reads one, “this is a pretty smart, funny and very adult horror with memorable characters, excellent gore, and an unapologetic respect for its audience – but can we maybe dilute it down to a toothless PG-13, and make them all vampires instead?”
In this universe, that’s pretty much what this movie feels like, just a significantly dumbed-down version of Ready or Not where stale clichés rule supreme, characters make one fundamentally stupid mistake after another, and heavily gothic supernatural elements turn into a laughably campy and ridiculous mess by the time we eventually reach that inevitable turning point. However, it isn’t even one of those cases where the movie is so dumb that it’s rather entertaining to watch; it’s just dumb, and not the fun kind either.
The film begins with our main character Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel), a New York-based freelancer who’s still getting over the death of her mother some months prior, discovering via a DNA ancestry service that she is vaguely related to a wealthy English family. Before she knows it, she’s whisked away to a mansion in the English countryside, where her new family members are gathering for a wedding, and where she meets and becomes charmed by the handsome lord of the manor, Walter (Thomas Doherty, who I suspect is the result of an alien species trying to create their own Richard Madden) – but her Charlotte Brontë-esque romantic adventure is cut short when she slowly learns the truth behind her presence, and why her suspiciously attentive new family are so eager to meet her (hint: they’re vampires).
I honestly don’t care that I’m giving that away, even though it’s not properly revealed until about halfway through, because if you’ve seen the trailer for this movie, then you’ll know that it lays that all out in the open (yet another example of Sony’s marketing department giving the entire game away in the promos). However, even if the trailer was somehow able to miraculously keep all of that under wraps, you’d have to be just as dumb as the lead character to not immediately pick up on the fact that there is something wrong with these people. From the darkened, cobweb-filled rooms of this large mansion, to the odd behaviour of its wealthy residents, all the way down to the staff – among them Sean Pertwee as the permanently gruff butler – who all look like they’ve tumbled out of a certain Bram Stoker novel, it’s impossible not to come to the immediate conclusion that this is the setting for a horror movie already in progress, well before any of that even becomes apparent. The villains aren’t even trying to hide their true intentions, doing weird and creepy stuff right in front of their new guest, who again is apparently so brainless that she can just shrug off whenever a character is clearly doing something sinister like it’s a fly on her shoulder, and easily accept flimsy excuses when she discovers physical evidence of disturbing behaviour. This character is so ignorant of the immediate dangers around her, and makes so many bad decisions throughout this movie, that after a point you just stop caring about this person, because everything that transpires afterwards is entirely on her, since she left things way too late to even do something about her terrible situation.
Like many brain-dead horror movies before it, The Invitation has very little ambition to it, relying far too heavily on jump-scares accompanied by loud musical stingers for its spooky moments (but at no point is it ever scary, and more just irritating), and indulging in nearly every convention in the book as though it thinks it’s the first film to ever use many of these overdone tropes. That makes everything about this film feel so predictable, not just because you’ve seen them all done many times before and in ways that make far more sense, but it telegraphs all of its twists and surprises with scarce subtlety that really does make it seem as though the filmmakers think so little of the audience’s intelligence. By taking the basic framework of films like Ready or Not and even Get Out (the film inevitably brings up the class and racial divide between our Black protagonist and the snooty white British folk she’s become entangled with), but handling them in such a dumb and unrefined manner, it both gives you newfound respect to those far better and smarter horror films, and makes you wish that you were just watching them instead. They’re also a lot more entertaining, for one, as The Invitation is surprisingly dull when it’s not trying way too hard to scare the audience, for a while leaning into a romance subplot that admittedly does have moments of charm (mostly because the actors, despite their thinly-written characters, are trying to make it work), but all the time you feel the lack of tension because you know that there’s something else going on, and you’re just waiting impatiently for that other shoe to drop so that it can get more into what kind of movie it really wants to be.
When it does finally reveal its true fangs (in more ways than one), things do perk up a little bit, with some actors going all in on their over-the-top camp deliveries that at the very least look like they were fun to perform on set – Thomas Doherty, in particular, is hamming it up like he’s a slightly more reserved Michael Sheen in the Twilight movies – but it all comes too late, well after the entertainment factor has long since departed and utter boredom has settled in. For all of its late-breaking silliness, not to mention a tonally confusing final scene that was blatantly added during reshoots (which must have taken place mere months ago, given the public reveal of one actor’s new hairstyle that is clumsily written in here), The Invitation is hardly inviting when it doesn’t even bother to make itself entertaining enough to justify all of its nonsense. Instead, it’s a dumb, stale, and fun-free attempt at gothic horror that only appeals to those who are already nostalgic for Twilight.
SO, TO SUM UP…
The Invitation is a dumb and incoherent stab at supernatural gothic horror, where not even some late-breaking descents into campier territory can save it from lame horror, thinly-written characters who make too many bad decisions, and a lack of ambition outside of aping the templates of much better and smarter horror movies.
