2015 Directed by Karyn Kusama
Will and his new girlfriend Kira are invited to a dinner with old friends at the house of Will’s ex Eden and her new partner David. Although the evening appears to be relaxed, Will soon gets a creeping suspicion that their charming host David is up to something.
My wife and I got a diner party invitation to one of her co-workers place in the next few weeks. We are not Fucking going!!
undeniably tense as fuck, Kusama works wonder on a tiny budget and also there's Lindsay Burdge, but this is the latest in a long line of kinda cheap / formally excellent domestic horror stories that feel content to be genre exercises, and deny themselves the opportunity to become more than that. it's a hell of a ride, but it's all surface... it's all putting the right beats in the right places... it works, but it might work too hard.
"... that was mercy"
the destructive, wavelike nature of grief as a communal experience that permeates every space we occupy, every movement we make & every interaction we have. kusama's formal grace is the obvious star here, the masterful staging, gestures & spatial awareness she shows off in particular, but as the film goes on & the screws tighten agonizingly slowly all the way until its haunting final image, kusama achieves something far beyond form -- her genre thrills deeply woven with a sense of the pervading, inescapable pain that, whether we're struggling to remember or forget, can blind us as easily as it brings us together.
So here's the thing.
Foreshadowing is a powerful storytelling tool if used correctly. It can give you a feeling of unease in a story that conveys a sense of normalcy. Without being able to put your finger on it, you get the sensation something is off, making you feel tense without knowing why.
The Invitation gets this. For about ten minutes. What remains is 60 minutes of foreshadowing with bits of story and character development in between. It lacks any and all subtlety. The main character literally keeps telling everyone something is wrong for two thirds of the film.
We get it. You're leading up to something.
I love slow burn thrillers. I love films that start out normal and…
88/100
A story of distance fed through the impenetrable barrier of grief. LA is seen as a glowing mirage within a hazy landscape, and the hills appear seductive, even flirtatious, in the face of looming modernity. It is where the damaged and the fearful, the deranged and the affected choose to reside, literal detachment encasing their unease. Karyn Kusama builds an entire universe - people as planets and spaces as mysterious areas of darkness and unknown conversations - so that the eventual horror unravels organically, all a singular puzzle although each piece is utterly fractured. And Will - played by a terrific Logan Marshall Green - is the audience surrogate, spinning around uncertain friends and foes in a woozy state,…
Hello, my dear and beloved letterboxd friends. Tomorrow I will be celebrating my 26th birthday! When I joined letterboxd, I was merely 22, still young and unexperienced, definitely not acquainted to the many issues of adulthood. Now, that I have seen, I have suffered, I have loved and I have lived, I feel nothing but enormous joy for sharing this space with you. Therefore, to celebrate life, love and joy, I extend a formal invitation to my birthday party, which will be celebrated on the evening of this Sunday at my secluded house on the hills. You are all invited and I hope to introduce you to some of my new friends I made in my last trip to Mexico.…
Logan Marshall-Greene is a poor man's Tom Hardy. I hated everyone's character in this movie. It reminded me of the hallway I used to avoid where the obnoxious theatre kids in college would hang out.
'The Invitation' is a beautifully paced film that leads to an end in which the events come thick and fast.
During the entire film the tension rises and rises. A decisive factor for this is the background music. A lot of diversified sounds resemble the rhythm of an alarm signal which is something that I haven't seen used before.
Thus the audience is continually alert.
A variety of different characters that all suit the wealthy looking setting
and a lot of intimate conversations create a strange feeling.
You should also pay attention to the lighting and the general use of brightness.
Although I have seen films with similar plots, the acting and little details do make this one special and absolutely worth seeing.
YES. So creepy. Original. I was asking tre whole time "what the fuck is going on", but in a good way.
Very tension-generating filming and acting. A great Marshall-Green Performance. Though, they should have dare more in the end.
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