"The Invitation" not bad as atmospheric, sufficiently lusty Diet Hammer Horror

The Invitation (2022)


A movie isn’t always sold with the marketing attention or the confidence it deserves from a studio. Unless it was distributor Sony’s plan all along to lower audience expectations and hit us with a surprisingly better-than-expected finished product, “The Invitation” actually stood more of a chance. As it turns out, director Jessica M. Thompson’s loose retelling of “The Brides of Dracula” (with ample comparison to hide-and-seek thriller “Ready or Not”) is much more enticing than its preconceived signs would suggest. 


Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel) is a struggling New York artist working as a cater waiter to pay the bills. At an event for a DNA testing company, her friend Grace (Courtney Taylor) snags her a swag bag with a test inside. Having lost her mother to cancer only a few months ago, Evie decides to see if she has any family out there, and sure enough, she’s got a bunch of relatives — very British and very white. Upon meeting one of them, second cousin Oliver (Hugh Skinner) from London, Evie is invited to “the wedding of the century” at a beautiful estate to meet even more of her aristocratic bloodline. As soon as she arrives, Evie realizes she’s the only person of color and notices a very upstairs/downstairs hierarchy with a condescending butler (Sean Pertwee) and all of the maids wearing numbers on their uniforms. Then she meets her host and the lord of the manor, Walter (Thomas Doherty), who happens to be criminally handsome and charming (and they’re not related). Is it too good to be true? Is the Pope Catholic?


Stopping there, “The Invitation” could almost play like a lustier contemporary Jane Austen romance (save for a prologue featuring a suicide and a few teases of something sinister afoot). Once the butler begins choosing which maid gets to dust which room at night, the viewer can figure out what kind of evil we are dealing with here in Blair Butler’s screenplay. Director Jessica M. Thompson manages to rise above a few generically edited jump scares with some chilling and atmospheric nighttime imagery (somebody on top of Evie’s canopy bed and a coat-hanging chair looking like a spindly person’s silhouette).


Nathalie Emmanuel (2021’s “F9: The Fast Saga”) has an appealing, no-nonsense je ne sais quo as Evie, and that’s a win for a character who, with a more assertive personality and a cool septum piercing, could have easily been a stand-in for Bella Swan or Anastasia Steele. Thomas Doherty is so impossibly seductive as the eternally hunky Walt that one cannot blame Evie for being smitten and getting swept up in this world. As the petty Viktoria, one of the maids of honor, Stephanie Corneliussen relishes in playing bad as if doing her best Eva Green impression. Courtney Taylor is also a naturally funny scene-stealer and audience surrogate as Evie’s slightly skeptical best friend at home living vicariously through her.


As is usually the case with some PG-13 horror films, one wonders if an R-rating would have improved the impact in certain places. Being allotted only one “fuck” (and it’s a good one), there’s a noticeable dubbing of “frick” and “friggin.’” On the other hand, a spa day with the girls is sharply edited and paced in between nail clippings and passive-aggressive banter at a suspenseful clip. A sequence with two maids being sent to the wine cellar is also sufficiently creepy (amusingly, one of the maids points out to the butler that it doesn’t take two of them to find a bottle). And, in spite of at least one editing goof between shots where a character is suddenly holding a wine glass, the film has a sleek, gothic sheen throughout, and an eerie, varied score by Dara Taylor. 


“The Invitation” knows that we know what the malevolent secret at its center is before Evie does. It doesn’t seem intended to be a jaw-dropping shock to us so much as it is to Evie (and someone is named “Jonathan Harker” after all). As the wedding festivities come to a halt at a masked dinner where the sinister intentions are laid out, we feel the betrayal that Evie experiences through a casual burst of violence, the use of close-ups, and Emmanuel’s performance. The third act is when the film really springs to life, but even before then, Emmanuel’s undeniable spark and an overall solid production carry us through. Following the annoying trend of same-titled movies to movies that aren’t even a decade old, “The Invitation” shouldn’t be confused with Karyn Kusama’s masterfully simmering 2016 thriller, but it’s still worth a look. It’s just good enough as Diet Hammer Horror to make you wish it was great.


Grade: B -


Sony Pictures Releasing is releasing “The Invitation” (104 min.) in theaters on August 26, 2022.

Comments