The Invitation

[Leisher]

A guy gets invited to a dinner party being thrown by his ex-wife, and upon arriving starts to realize something sinister is happening. (I just wrote that line myself, then visited the IMDB page to find the summary matches that almost word for word.)

This film's biggest problem is that it's slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.

I can't understate that.

It's well acted enough, but most of the movie is spent following the main character as he suffers flashbacks and is incredulous about nobody else at the party seeing that shit's amiss, and he's fucking right. I mean, if you were invited to a reunion and the folks who invited you were acting insane (and I want to give you the list, but no spoilers...), you'd be freaking out, not "being polite" and acting like nothing's wrong.

So I blame the writer for this film's flaws. I mean, perfectly timed coincidences are used to advance the plot and there's too much "looking the other way" by the characters to make the story feel tight. In fact, I could do a decent sized list right now of all the plot holes.

That being said, the premise is interesting. The ending shot actually made the journey worth it to me. It evoked thoughts of another major film franchise that's big right now.

What's funny is the IMDB folks hated the third act, but loved the shit I found slow. Now typically those folks are like old school critics and everything popular is shit and movies that make nothing are "misunderstood and brilliant". I find it humorous that none of them seemed to have picked up on all the plot holes, like the cell phone stuff.

Is it worth seeing? If you're willing to sit through a slow paced film touted as a psychological horror despite plot holes and people acting like nothing's going on when stuff is clearly going on, then yes. You will KNOW the whole movie's plot by 15 minutes in, but there WILL be two moments that you won't see coming. One is lazy writing, the other is interesting, but it's that final shot. I don't regret seeing this film, but I'd never watch it again. And while I loved that final shot, I don't know how they'd take it farther without more bad writing.