When a DNA test reveals a long line of aristocratic lineage, it seems like a dream come true. That is, until the price of belonging is more bloody than anyone could have imagined. Dun, dun, dun…. This was the premise that I believed I was getting into.
While “The Invitation” offers a dark, unsettling mood at the beginning, it’s an RSVP you might regret saying “yes” to. The initial scenes suggest a slow-burn thriller that creates anticipation for the scares to come. The potential for a great gothic film is there, which is why I was so upset with the following mistakes.
This atmosphere almost immediately breaks because of a crucial mistake: an overzealous amount of darkness. Not only thematically, but also literally, as many scenes were poorly lit and hard to watch. What should be scary will probably have you reaching for the remote to adjust the brightness, or at least, that’s what it did to me.
But shockingly, the darkness is not the movie’s worst mistake, it’s the lack of subtlety. The mystery, which the trailer generously gives away (they’re all vampires), is further shown in the film with the nuance of a sledgehammer. Every twist has had around 70 clues in the minutes leading up to it, making every scare banal. This causes the film to be stripped of suspense and makes the final reveal land with a “really? That’s all?” The movie plays out from start to finish just as shown in the trailer, with practically no surprises.
Delivering the best performance in the movie, Nathalie Emmanual (“Game of Thrones”) plays Evelyn–or Evie, as she prefers. But there’s only so much she could do with that clunky dialogue. She plays a vulnerable woman who recently lost her mother. Evie’s desire for connection leads her to snag a DNA test from the event she was catering and discover a family of wealthy, exclusively white (shocking), British cousins.
Ignoring normal human logic, she follows her cousin to a suspicious British manor. There, she is immediately snubbed, finding she is the only person of color besides the maids. The film does a good job of immediately laying out red flags from the condescending attitude of the butler to the literal spikes on her window. But all that’s okay because there’s still the hot lord of the manor. And he’s one of the only people not related to Evie, so that’s a win.
Despite the initial setup for suspense, the narrative relies too much on cheap jump scares instead of an atmosphere of dread. It squanders the tension of its gothic premise, failing to integrate the creepy dynamics for a true psychological thriller.
The final act abandons any sense of creativity, diving once again into overused tropes. But what can you really expect with a vampire movie besides a lack of originality? For a movie that started with such a compelling atmosphere, its descent into predictability is the greatest letdown of all.
