Listen, I know I am not alone who saw The Invitation and first two things that came to mind was Get Out and Ready or Not. I am also glad I called it because that’s exactly what it gave, albeit with a PG-13 rating and added fangs.
Here is Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel), an aspiring ceramicist who makes her living as a cater waiter in New York. When her friend swipes a swag bag from an upscale gig, she discovers a free trial for a DNA site called Find Yourself. Recently orphaned, she can’t help but feel curious when her search turns up a match in an overly enthusiastic Brit named Oliver (Hugh Skinner). Her long lost cousin happens to be loaded, delighted to make her acquaintance, and invites her on an all expenses paid trip to England to attend a posh family wedding.This surely gets me interested.
Undeterred by the oily glee with which Oliver delivers the phrase, “Great Uncle Alfred is dying to meet you,” Evie pulls up to Carfax in total awe. Though she’s introduced as a woman of the people, kindly helping pick up the glassware she caused the maids to drop, she loses all spine once she encounters the Lord of the house, Walter DeVille (Thomas Doherty). He takes an immediate liking to her. He has a way he speaks to his staff, not the good kind.
Evie is introduced to her long lost family members, all of whom are old white men. Creepy right?
In her nightmares, Evie sees visions of the woman who hung herself in the house, and is startled by a bird smacking dead into the window. As her romance with Walt heats up, so do the house’s quirks, and she finds herself visited in the night by the clawed creature.
All in all, “The Invitation” has a distinct air of white feminism wafting through it.
When Evie is finally offered her deal with the devil, she is promised “wealth, power, a life of privilege, a sense of belonging. She spends the entire movie romanticizing wealth and power, only turning her back on them when it’s revealed she’ll have to kill to keep them. The pace picks up when the slashing finally begins in the third act, but it’s too little, too late to get the blood going.
It is not the worst movie ever, but it is certainly not good.