Tense L.A. dinner party serves up doubt, paranoia
Even if you haven’t attended a vaguely menacing dinner party lately, whether in the Hollywood hills or somewhere less photogenic, the crafty L.A. thriller “The Invitation” casts quite a spell.
This is “Girlfight” director Karyn Kusama’s fourth feature, and it’s an elegant slow burner operating on (and requiring) a certain amount of patience. That patience is rewarded, and then capped by one of the nicest final shots since Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”
No birds here, just humans in various states of perplexity, grief and suspicion. Two years before the present-day action of “The Invitation,” Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and Eden (Tammy Blanchard) suffered a terrible loss: the accidental death of their 5year-old son, at home. The marriage dissolved; Eden retreated to Mexico, where she met smooth, reassuring David (Michiel Huisman), her new husband.
Will and his new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) are among the guests for a reunion dinner among old friends, plus two new friends of the hosts. Nearly the entire film takes place in and around Will and Kira’s home, from which the twinkling blur of L.A. looks beautiful and mirage-y. The wine’s excellent. Will seems to think Eden has recovered better than he has over their shared loss. What’s her secret?
We learn that secret in due course, and that’s probably enough narrative rehash for this one. “The Invitation” is fairly simple, really. Screenwriters Phil Hay (who is married to director Kusama) and Matt Manfredi play the old game of spreading varying degrees of doubt and hints of sinister motives among their characters.
David keeps locking the doors in the name of security (the occasional police helicopter whooshing by overhead is a key part of Phillip Blackford’s sound design). Ace character actor John Carroll Lynch plays Pruitt, one of the newfound friends of the hosts, and once we hear his story, “The Invitation” shifts gears subtly into a different sort of thriller.
The movie is a small marvel of contained spaces, exploited beautifully by Kusama and cinematographer Bobby Shore. Exploitation of another kind comes with any thriller dealing in the death of a child and the aftermath.
“The Invitation” doesn’t have the emotional heft to use its story points for a higher purpose. But it’s an unusually evocative achievement in suspense, and in a brand of cinematic paranoia unique to the hills, canyons and denizens of L.A.
Joan Didion’s “White Album” essay feels like an inspiration for Kusama’s film. In “The White Album,” Didion wrote of “this mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’ — this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it — was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969.” That free-floating, nervous-breakdown quality informs the look, the sound, the everything in “The Invitation.”