‘The Invitation’ (2016) ***/*****
This party finally starts jumping right when it’s time to go home
They say that the last thing an audience sees when they’re watching a movie is the first thing they remember when they start looking back on it. End your film on a strong note and you can make up for a lot of mistakes that might have been made somewhere in the middle. It feels like there’s some truth to that premise, right? But how far can it be taken? Say a movie has a completely awesome third act — just a slam-bang escalation of high stakes situations and impactful character moments that all wrap up in the perfect way — but everything that came before that awesome third act was plodding, directionless, maybe even a little bit boring. Would you still walk away from the movie thinking it was great? This doesn’t have to be a rhetorical question. Watch The Invitation and you’ll likely find out exactly how you’d react to such a moviegoing experience.
The Invitation is the newest thriller from Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama. It’s about a man named Will (Logan Marshall Green) and his new girlfriend, Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi), quite suddenly receiving a dinner invitation from Will’s ex-wife, Eden (Tammy Blanchard), and her new boyfriend, David (Michiel Huisman), two years after their child died in a tragic accident, their marriage ended, and she disappeared completely. It’s about them receiving this invitation and then actually going to the party, instead of scoffing and immediately throwing it in the trash like anyone in their right mind would. When they get to the party, things are predictably weird, but not weird in the way that you might predict. You see, Eden and her new beau have spent the last two years down in Mexico, living in a compound with a group of people who are totally not a cult, and if you have a few minutes, they’d like to sit you down and talk to you about what a life-changing experience it was.
The big reason the first two-thirds of this film don’t really work as well as they should is that they drop you down in the middle of a dinner party that has a good number of attendees, and after an hour of it you still can’t really describe who any of the guests are, as characters. You can say that Will has experienced a great deal of pain, and is wounded and withdrawn as a result, and you can say that Eden has experienced the same pain, and seems to be detached and deluded as a result, and you can say that there’s something creepy about David’s faux-politeness and the way he always tries to control a situation, but other than that — you’ve just got a lot of faceless people sitting around in living rooms and at dinner tables making vague references to some kind of shared history that you don’t know anything about.
Of the cast, Green is the only one who you could say really gives a stand-out performance, and that’s because his character’s emotional state is the most complex, and he’s given by far the most to do. Despite the fact that this dinner party has a totally weird vibe, its hosts keep pulling totally weird stunts, and the environment it’s set in has been locked down and controlled in totally weird ways, Will is really the only character who seems to have any problem with the situation. The rest of the inert characters just sit cow-faced while things happen to them, as Will begs and pleads with them to have any sort of reaction to it at all. Add this frustration to the fact that seeing his ex-wife and being in his old house is bringing up memories of his kid’s death, and Will is a character who’s got quite a bit to chew on. Green does well projecting not only his pain and his frustration, but also the conflict that exists inside of him where he kind of just wants to go along with everything too, so that his life can maybe return to some sort of normalcy.
Blanchard is okay as Eden, who seems to be more ill at ease with whatever has been planned for this party than her new partner is, but honestly her character is written so broadly that her performance can’t help but slip into camp a time or two. Most importantly though, the main thing you need to know about her character is that she’s constantly putting on a false face, and Blanchard is really great when it comes to throwing beaming smiles while her eyes radiate pain. Apart from those two, John Carroll Lynch manages to stand out a bit, but that’s not necessarily because he gets much to do, it’s more because he looks physically different from everyone else at the party (to a purpose), and Lindsay Burdge manages to stand out because her character is written to do a few very weird things, and she’s able to project a palpable nervous energy as she does them, which suits her well once things go completely crazy in the third act and she’s allowed to steal the entire film.
Before we talk about that crazy third act we have to talk about the build to it though. The Invitation has some pacing issues. It’s always tempting to refer to movies like this as “slow burns,” but when you really break down the story beats of this film, it’s not really a slow burn at all, it’s more of a controlled simmer. Instead of having this party appear to be normal at first, and then something slightly odd happens, and then something slightly odd and dangerous happens, in an escalating manner that would give the narrative some momentum, the dinner party here starts out pretty weird, periodically has things that happen that are essentially equally weird, and then after an hour and twenty minutes of awkward weirdness, things get absolutely crazy out of nowhere. A little bit more of a focus on nuts and bolts storytelling — on introducing a small threat and then building it in a deliberate way — could have gone a long way toward making the bulk of this film feel like a mystery that was actually moving toward something rather than a frustratingly stagnant exercise in watching morons refuse to leave a party even after the people throwing it have clearly turned out to be dangerous freaks.
Once the other shoe drops, this movie really does get amazing though. One minute you’re sitting around a table while the people throwing the party continue to talk crazy and our protagonist continues to try to point their craziness out to all of the other characters, to no avail, just like you were for the previous hour and twenty minutes, and the next you’re thrown into a thrilling game of cat and mouse that feels as shocking and sudden as if the Manson Family broke through your front door while you were half-snoozing on the couch watching old episodes of Seinfeld. Characters get so intense in this final twenty minutes of the film that they’ll make your leg start to unconsciously jitter, the things they do get so hardcore that your eyes will widen in disbelief like you’re some kind of rube who’s never watched a movie before — and it all leads up perfectly to one final image that’s so sublime it will have you walking away from the film pumping your fist and grinning. Whether or not that moment of bliss makes up for the hour and twenty minutes that felt like a chore to get through though, that’s the sort of thing that’s going to vary from person to person.
