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.…
A great thriller/drama the like of which I have never seen before. The sound editing is quite good at creating an ominous tension throughout the movie. The suspense last up until the very end of the movie, which to me was quite a disappointment. (SPOILER) However, I did like the concept of a “mansonian” type of horror film with the uncertainty of having friends suddenly turn cult members.
Grief and paranoia done seductively through mise-en-scène. Logan Marshall Green should have been nominated for best actor.
Really interesting and layered thriller, but I felt that it just played notes that we already have seen a bunch of times. Loved the last scene though.
evil cult movies are the shit
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Ok so I dissapeared and now I have to update with all the movies I've watched lol
Slowest of the slow burns... fascinated by the concept of the very, very end, but it doesn’t redeem the dullness of the movie itself.
In short: The uncanny valley of movies.
It’s just like. Fine? I guess? There are moments where the dialogue and acting are pretty good or, passable I guess, but then there are points where the acting and the dialogue is just garbage.
And honestly if the last 20 mins of this movie didn’t go down, this would have been a much more interesting movie about a paranoid traumatized man ruining a dinner party and it woulda fooled me real good. But instead it just turned out as a predictable weirdly unrealistic mess. So. Idk 3/5?
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