THE INVITATION – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

Suspense is difficult to build, and truly tricking your audience is hard. THE INVITATION is a film that proposes an ending for itself within the first thirty minutes, and immediately gets the audience rooting for it to get there. It then introduces a number of new plot elements calling that ending into question, and becomes an even richer work in the process.

Now, that’s how you create thematic suspense that’s immediately built into your movie. Proposing two possible interesting endings leaves an audience in desperation of what could possibly happen, and isn’t that the purpose of a vicious thriller?

And THE INVITATION is a vicious thriller. The way it jolts you around is inspired, but the fact that it has layers of built in suspense makes it even better. It’s about a group of friends who meet up for a dinner party two years after a traumatic event lead them  on different paths. The result is a typical dinner party conversation, with all the unhinged energy that one might hold. The Invitation understands that meeting up with people, especially ones that you’ve had experiences with can be a little bit awkward, and it plays that to the film’s advantage. These people are comfortable with each other so any pretense toward otherwise eccentric stuff being dangerous seems to go out the window. Yet, something seems off. Something that could end in a gorefest. The film leaves you wondering how everything is going to end, and builds its suspense around which way it will go.

The ending pays everything off in surprising, and even a little bit silly, ways (the final shot seems a bit preposterous), and everything else about the film is there to boost the audiences indecisiveness. St. Louis native Karyn Kusama’s direction plays to the warmth of the surrounding, but the actors are constantly exploiting the awkwardness of a dinner party.  The film easily exploits the perspective of its main character, the ex husband of the host, to keep the tone unnerved, but most of the other characters seem to be very receptive of the events. The actors work their roles beautifully as some of them create characters that both increase, and decrease the unnerving, splitting the way the film could go in many directions. Tom Hardy look alike, Logan Marshall-Green serves perfectly as the ex husband, Will. As the audience POV character it’s almost completely up to him to guide the audience’s ideas of each character. It’s so easy to side with Green that the necessary themes needed to build the film’s suspense are already built into the movie as the party like attitude of the people breaks every once in awhile. Another notable player is John Carroll Lynch, who from moment one fills the film with dread. If one problem does arise (other than the sillier aspects of the ending) it might be the front load of expositional dialogue. The actors still work with what they’re given, but it’s such a sloppy move in an otherwise well-planned production.

THE INVITATION makes for a tale of suspense that you don’t often see. It invites you think about what could happen, and plays the thematic undertones of its own payoff against you until it finally does so in sublime fashion. THE INVITATION is a testament to how well-planned thrillers by way of Hitchcock can still leave us shivering and in awe.

4 1/2 out of 5 stars

THE INVITATION plays excluisively in St. Louis at The Chase Park Plaza Cinema (212 Kingshighway Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63108) beginning April 22nd. . The film’s director Karyn Kusama, a St. Louis native, will be appearing at the Chase Park Plaza Cinema for two showings. She will be introducing the film and taking part in a post-film Q&A with Andy Triefenbach  of DestroytheBrain.com SATURDAY, APRIL 23 at 7:20pm and SUNDAY, APRIL 24 at 2:50pm.