The Invitation review.
The Invitation does a decent job of slow playing what it really is. Unfortunately, it can’t hide all of the things that it isn’t. Some fine performances do their best to avoid being swallowed in tedium.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
The Invitation
Directed by Jessica M. Thompson
Written by Blair Butler
Starring Nathalie Emmanuel, Thomas Doherty, Stephanie Corneliussen, Alana Boden, Hugh Skinner and Sean Pertwee.
The Invitation Review
The Invitation came out right before this website launched. It was still in theaters at the time of our first review…and we could, some would argue should, have watched and reviewed it the first week of the site. We did not. The reason it was put off was that, frankly, it got poor reviews. In part a desire to not start off the site with such a potentially negative review. In part because the thought of heading to the theater to sit and watch a bad horror movie that had already been widely reviewed just wasn’t that appealing. Box office had already fallen off…and it just seemed like a better idea to wait for The Invitation to hit streaming and become a bit more relevant again. Well…good news. It’s now streaming on Netflix. Bad news. The reviews were right…It’s not great.
Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel) is a struggling artist who has lost all her immediate family. When she uses a DNA service to find living relatives, she learns that she has an extended wealthy family in England. When she attends a wedding to meet with her unknown family she begins to fall for the Lord of the manor, Walter (Thomas Doherty). It’s a horror movie so things, of course, are not what they seem.
I didn’t pay attention to the advertising of The Invitation when it was coming out so I’m not sure if they were trying to hide what kind of movie it is. We will avoid specific spoilers in this review since many will be watching it for the first time now that it has hit streaming…but the movie itself does a pretty good job holding off revealing what it is. I didn’t know for a while, at least.
This is partially because The Invitation does an incredibly poor job with the rules of the subgenre it’s playing in. I mean…terrible. Until you need to know what’s going on…there are fine little hints all over…and you dismiss them because it doesn’t make a lick of sense. It decides to establish a different set of rules and thinks it’s clever that it didn’t play by the rules you thought. But you aren’t even looking at the movie through the lens so it’s not subverting anything. It’s just…dumb.
That said, it could have been saved if it had cut loose after its third act reveal. Had The Invitation opted to go bonkers and over the top with fun and mayhem…you’d easily forgive the clumsy first two acts. Clumsy and boring. It seems to want to be a romance movie until it isn’t…which would be fine had it not been marketed as a horror movie in the first place. At the point it finally becomes one, it’s too late. You’ve spent an hour being bored by a movie that isn’t what you thought it was…just so it could turn into a movie you did, and it somehow thinks that’s a surprise?
If that sounds infuriating…I can assure that it isn’t. Not enough happens in the movie to be infuriated by. I wish it had been infuriating because then, at least, The Invitation would have made me feel something. Set aside the headache of choices made that we have, and some we can’t, talked about here. The biggest problem with the movie is that it wastes a strong lead performance of an interesting character.
Evie leaves her life behind to try to find a connection to family and all you can think about the whole time she’s in England is how much more interesting the movie would be if it was just an indie drama about a struggling artist. Maybe the romance stuff will work for you. These are attractive people with some chemistry. If that’s the kind of movie you’re looking forward to…The Invitation might be right up your alley. It didn’t work as well as it should have because, again, we know this is a horror movie. It even has early moments to remind you that it is a horror movie. But you’re just sitting there waiting for it to become a horror movie. That takes away from any romance.
Nathalie Emmanuel is great as Evie. If there’s any reason to watch The Invitation, she’s it. It has a decent look, though for a movie that wants to be gothic…it doesn’t really try to evoke much of an aesthetic. There were just so many ways to go about the story of The Invitation better than they did here. Ways that could have been romantic, scary or at least surprising. They chose to hide away the genre you already know it is and treat revealing it as a surprise. What type of horror movie it is specifically is kind of a surprise, I guess. But once it heads into that realm you just find yourself disappointed in how bland and flawed it is at being it.
Scare Value
The Invitation finds itself coming up short too often to earn a recommendation. It simply takes too long to get to the meat of the story and then doesn’t provide enough fun once it does. A wild third act could have saved a movie that skates by on the charm of its lead actors. Emmanuel does everything that she can to elevate a movie that feels longer than it is. It’s a well-made movie that struggles to be what it should be…and does so slowly.
2/5
The Invitation Links
Streaming on Netflix
Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu
Rent/Buy on VOD from Amazon
Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon
The Invitation Trailer
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