The best thing you'll see all week: The Invitation

Given the strength of Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay’s script for The Invitation, I hesitate to mention their previous credits. Suffice it to say they wrote Karyn Kusama’s Aeon Flux adaptation, a flawed but overlooked gem of characterization, stylish action tableaus, and sci-fi gobbledygook. Kusama’s movie credits have mostly been genre stories with strong female characters, from Girlfight to Aeon Flux to Jennifer’s Body, also a flawed gem that has the distinction of being Diablo Cody’s least Diablo Cody script.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2016/04/11/best-thing-youll-see-week-invitation

I've read so many great reviews of this movie over the past few days and each of them have managed this same coy tone about what's actually going on - not a bad thing really, it's certainly piqued my interest. But now I'm a little worried it may have been built up too much, can't live up to what I'm imagining could be going on. Well, only one way to find out.

Correction:
"Lennie James’ mentor i[n] that one episode of Walking Dead"

This is on Netflix now. I’m on mobile, so I don’t want to discuss too much without easy access to spoiler tags. Suffice to say, watch this. It’ll give your core a great workout.

Whew, that was great. Seems like Huinsman is in everything I have watched lately. Wild, Orphan Black, GoT. I loved Logan Marshall-Green in this and I remembered after the fact he is in the new Cinemax show Quarry, which I keep almost starting. He seems a little Tom Hardy-ish, but in this, he just seemed perfect. I am terrible at film analysis. Good dialog, a decent amount of originality and a visceral reaction is what I usually require of a performance and a film and this one had performances in that vein and I enjoyed the film immensely based on the same criteria.

From the first scene, which I won’t spoil, it seemed like it would be special and inside, rather than a dread building, it was more a sense of glee for how good it was.

SPOILERS…

I hate that all such movies must end with the final fights. This one handled it better than most and I am not sure any ending would have been satisfying. My only analysis is in that dissatisfaction the movie again resembles life. You endure all of the pain and drama and long for things to come out a little more fulfilling and they do not.

The realization when Choy shows up almost makes you feel like you are being given a reprieve from the pain. Things are not as screwed up as you imagined, but in the back of your mind and through the tears, you know it’s all still fucked. Even if they aren’t about to all come to some horrible fate, your marriage is still over and your son is still dead.

Particularly poignant in my own life right now. I would have though I needed a break from it, but this film actually was oddly soothing.

Alright, I’ll leave my half-baked analysis for those of you who are good at it. :) Sufficed to say, I want all movies to be this good. Real life emotional pain, to me, makes for a better thriller than those that emphasize more physical pain.

Watched this in our annual Halloween horror-movie roundup (it’s on Netflix), and I’m frankly kind of mystified about why people liked this.

Admittedly, I’m not super sophisticated about appraising acting quality, so I could be missing something in the performances there, but i felt from a movie-construction perspective, it just didn’t hold together.

So, I guess that the prime tension that’s supposed to be pleasurable is the question of “is there actually anything weird going on in the house”. But that doesn’t feel like a compelling question because the film lays the horror vibe down really thick from the first minute. And once that train gets rolling, everything plays out in kind of the most predictable way possible.

This did seem to be a uniquely LA-y movie, so maybe it speaks to people who live in the valley in a way that it just misses otherwise. But I wasn’t feeling it.

Some more spoilery thoughts.

I feel like any other ending would have been better:

  • there’s no explicit horror element. The dinner party just ends and everybody goes home. The film is just a portrait of grief and anxiety and existential horror.
  • there is a horror element, but it isn’t just normal weird cult stuff, it’s because there’s a real shoggoth in the garage, but nobody seems to be talking about it.
  • the protagonist watches the video, decides it the best way to resolve his own grief, and joins in the shenanigans at the end.

Dont even get me started on the mechanics of the murder plan, because, like, who poisons the dessert wine? What kind of philistine chugs a sauternes? If you’re going to murder everybody anyways, why make the first half of the dinner party so fucking weird? Make it actually fun and just poison the Jaeger shots 2 hours in. Also, bring more than one gun.

Considering how much time we…spent in the first half of the film, I barely had a sense for any of the characters, and I particularly didn’t feel like I had a good grasp on what the cult was even trying to do. I guess that maybe freeing others of their pain is a mitzvah (e.g. the coyote), and that’s how you get to super heaven? But what about the people you killed? Kind of a dick move, if they’re your friends, to kill rather than convert them.

I also didn’t like the coyote/big dude murder parallelism, because I don’t think it meant anything. They weren’t the same situation, the girlfriend didn’t develop as a character to get from A to B, it was just a visual callback with nothing supporting it.

I really like the idea of a horror movie that uses social anxiety as it’s horror kicking off point…but this didn’t really do that.

Maybe it’s unfair to compare to some of the recent genre standouts, but I loved the slow burn tension in House Of The Devil, and felt that, e.g. the beginning of You’re Next did a better job of capturing the horror of social obligations. I feel like I was on board with the concept of the film, but just didn’t feel that it executed it well.

This was solid. I thought it threaded the grief / paranoia needle pretty well overall. I do kinda resent the needless “would ya lookit that!” escalation at the end, though.

As an allegory of a lot of bad stuff that life is made of, I loved it.

As such, I don’t think it should be taken more to face value than, say, an episode of Buffy. Social horror is such a great subgenre of horror.
I resonated a lot with the “meeting again with people that were your friends in a previous life” aspect. I thought that was so spot on. Especially the social exhibitionnism scene.
Like @wumpus, I felt that the ultimate, ultimate second of the movie was just not needed. It felt like a very heavy wink.

Really glad I could finally watch it.

Yeah, some restraint at the end would have been slightly better. Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and when to run…