Director Jessica M. Thompson’s The Invitation fails to live up to its own spooky, bloody potential. It hits theaters on Friday, August 26.
The Invitation wears its influences on its sleeve. The film’s moody, effectively spooky opening prologue, which throws viewers headfirst into the deserted halls of a creepy British mansion on one fateful night, feels like something that could have been ripped right out of a Guillermo del Toro film. Its premise, meanwhile, feels so strikingly similar to that of 2019’s Ready or Not that the YouTube page for The Invitation’s spoilerific first trailer is filled with comments comparing the two films.
In a sense, there’s something endearing about how obviously indebted The Invitation is to filmmakers like del Toro and modern horror thrillers like Ready or Not. But The Invitation also makes a classic mistake. It is, after all, commonly understood that acknowledging one’s influences is only a good idea if you’re capable of delivering something that still feels new and fresh. The Invitation doesn’t manage to do either. Instead, the ambitious, overlong new film packs neither the bite nor the thrills present in so many of its genre predecessors.
That’s not to say The Invitation doesn’t try to bring something new to its familiar vampire tale. Rather than adopting the perspective of its central vampires or taking place in a past version of Transylvania, The Invitation begins in modern-day New York City and follows Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel), a struggling artist who makes a living working the kind of catering gigs that force her to navigate crowds of endlessly rude, handsy elites. Evie’s life is turned upside down, however, when she participates in a 23andMe-esque DNA testing program that reveals her ancestral connection to a wealthy family based in England.
When one of her British cousins reaches out and invites her to a family wedding, Evie flies across the pond in the hopes of having the U.
