The Invitation (2022)

Official trailer

The Invitation deserves its 5 as a glossy, watchable, and forgettable studio horror film that takes a promising gothic premise and sands off everything interesting about it in pursuit of a wide audience. A young American woman discovers wealthy English relatives she never knew she had, is invited to a lavish estate wedding, and slowly realizes the family harbors a dark secret involving Dracula himself.

It’s a serviceable gothic romance with horror trappings, competently made and pleasant enough to watch, but so cautious and predictable that it never generates real tension or surprise. This is horror with the corners rounded off.

I wanted to like The Invitation more than I did. Dracula hiding inside an English society wedding is a setup I’d pay to see done properly, and the first half hour teases me with it. Then the film gets nervous about scaring anybody, and the rest of it has me waiting for a commitment that never comes.

The film’s problem is timidity. It had the ingredients for something gothic and atmospheric and settled for being a safe, glossy, lightly scary date-night picture. It has a few effective moments and a likable lead, and it squanders its premise on the path of least resistance.

A Promising Setup

Its premise has real gothic potential. Evie, a struggling young woman alone in the world, suddenly discovers a wealthy, aristocratic English family and is whisked away to their grand country estate, where everyone is beautiful and charming and something is clearly wrong beneath the surface. This is classic gothic territory, the innocent outsider drawn into a sinister world of old money and older secrets, and the setup promises slow-building dread.

The early stretches deliver some of that promise. The estate is gorgeous, the sense of the outsider among predatory aristocrats has a real charge, and the film flirts with interesting ideas about class, seduction, and the way the powerful consume the vulnerable. For a while it seems the film might develop into a proper gothic, using its wedding-at-a-sinister-estate premise to build mounting unease. The ingredients for a strong film are all present in the first act.

This first act is the movie I wish I’d gotten for the whole runtime. The estate is gorgeous, the aristocrats smile a little too hard, and I like Evie enough to worry about her. I’d have happily sat through another hour of that slow squeeze.

The Safe Choices

Caution is the film’s fatal flaw. Aimed at a wide commercial audience, it pulls every punch, keeping the horror mild, the violence restrained, and the tone glossy and accessible instead of frightening. Where a bolder film would have committed to the gothic dread, the class horror, and the predatory sexuality the premise invites, The Invitation keeps everything tasteful and tame, more interested in being a pleasant gothic romance than a real horror film.

This timidity drains the tension. The twists are visible long before they arrive, the scares are mild and conventional, and the film never makes the audience uneasy. The reveal of the Dracula connection, which should be a thrilling escalation, lands with a shrug because the film has been so cautious throughout. By refusing to commit to either full gothic horror or full romance, the film ends up a watered-down version of both, competent and unmemorable. Its desire to please everyone leaves it with no real identity.

The Dracula reveal is where the film loses me. It’s the biggest card the story holds, and the film plays it like a footnote. By then I’d guessed most of it, and the movie hadn’t given me a single scare strong enough to make the confirmation hurt.

What Works

The film isn’t without merits. Nathalie Emmanuel is likable as Evie, grounding the film with a warm, relatable presence and making her character’s predicament easy to invest in even when the script lets her down.

She’s better than the material, and her charm gets the film through its slower, safer stretches. The production is handsome, the estate setting is atmospheric, and the film is never less than watchable on a surface level.

Emmanuel deserves a better movie. She makes Evie warm and quick and easy to root for, and whenever the script lets her down she sells the scene anyway. I’d gladly watch her lead a horror film that trusts her with real fear.

There are also a few effective moments scattered through the back half, when the film briefly remembers it’s supposed to be horror and delivers a jolt or two. The climax picks up some energy as the secret is finally revealed and Evie has to fight for survival, and the film ends more strongly than its sluggish middle suggests it might. But these are flashes in an otherwise tame film, glimpses of the more committed movie that might have been, and they’re not enough to lift it above the forgettable.

Is The Invitation worth watching?

The Invitation gets its 5 as a glossy, watchable, timid studio horror film that wastes a promising gothic premise on safe, predictable choices. The setup of an outsider drawn into a sinister aristocratic family has real potential, and Nathalie Emmanuel is a likable and grounding lead, but the film pulls every punch, keeping the horror mild and the tension slack in pursuit of the widest possible audience. It loses points for visible twists, weak scares, and a fatal caution that leaves it satisfying neither as horror nor as romance.

That’s why it sits at a 5. Emmanuel and the estate make it easy enough to watch, but almost nothing in it sticks, and forgettable is worse than flat-out bad. A Dracula wedding story ought to leave some bruises, and the people who made this one were too worried about the wide audience to let it.

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