The Invitation Movie Review: Conventional, Hoary Horror Thriller

Cast: Nathalie Emmanuel, Thomas Doherty, Stephanie Corneliussen, Alana Boden, Hugh Skinner, Kata Sarbó, Scott Alexander Young, Virág Bárány
Director: Jessica M. Thompson

Young Adult vampire romances have been done to death after Twilight's success, so this new film, in a similar vein, fails to raise interest. Even Jessica M. Thompson's attempt to revitalize horror movie tropes comes unstuck for most of this film's runtime.

As a significant aspect of the plot, we have the naïve yet smart heroine falling prey to a rush of emotional longing. After all the ceramics artist, Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel) a young American woman of mixed race, alone after her mother's demise, is persuaded to visit her long-lost white family in England for the "wedding of the century," by an overly zealous second cousin (Hugh Skinner).

The second cousin is someone she discovers on the DNA website's family tree following a swab test. At the Gothic Manor and plush estate where the wedding festivities are to take place, she meets Walter(Thomas Doherty)...and the two fall promptly in lust. Evie s unaware of the history of the manor and its inhabitants and goes along with the festivities until she begins to see the abnormality of the situation she has put herself in.

We see British nobility engaging in Vampirism and distant cousin Evie too becomes a victim. The annotation on white generational wealth, race, class, and male privilege is incidental and not part of the narrative's grand design. There's nothing special here. The clichéd hoary tropes on display can do little but make you weary and bored. The setup may have sounded interesting but what follows is highly predictable and unexciting.

Coupled with darkened camerawork and foreseeable last-minute twists, the narrative makes the going rather difficult for its audience. The pace is rather slow, and there's shock value in the heroine's sudden turnaround but the contrary contrivance in the plotting doesn't make for a fulfilling watch. It's formulaic, replete with jump scares and campy overtones.

That final revelation is meant to surprise but those familiar with horror movies will see it coming. The narrative feels slightly underdeveloped and lacks a strong enough idea. The narrative is slick enough but there's nothing special here to set it apart from the hackneyed, formulaic genre facsimiles.