The Invitation is a waste of perfectly good evil vampires
Vampires are cinema’s most malleable monsters. They can sparkle, skateboard, yell “bat”, or do gymnastics, all while fulfilling their bloodsucking duties. In the horror movie The Invitation, vampires take on their more familiar role as society’s rich and powerful, as an unlucky human guest joins them for the weekend. The Invitation comes from director Jessica M. Thompson (The Light of the Moon), and while it pulls inspiration from several recent and successful out-of-place houseguest horror movies like Get Out and Ready or Not, The Invitation never manages to be scary, and it hides its vampires behind a lifeless love story.
The Invitation follows Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel), an unhappy and over-it gig-caterer in New York who’s fed up with her dead-end job, desperate to follow her passion for ceramics, and still reeling from her mother’s recent death. One day, Evie snags a gift bag from a swanky event she’s catering and tries out the included DNA testing kit. The test connects her to a previously unknown branch of her family that lives among the upper crust of English society. Before Evie knows it, she’s been invited to a mysterious wedding at an English estate, where she meets and quickly falls for the enigmatic Walter (Thomas Doherty), the lord of the manor.
This series of events takes almost all of the movie’s 105-minute run time to play out. That may surprise viewers who’ve seen any of the promotional material for this movie, which is far more focused on the story’s vampiric presence. The bait-and-switch of subbing a dubious romance in for vampire violence wouldn’t be much of a problem if the movie were willing to invest in the Gothic style and foreboding atmosphere that helps make vampire love stories timelessly
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