The Invitation
Bram Stoker is given a make-over in a hackneyed re-imagining of his tired tale.
Lady in red: Nathalie Emmanuel
As every horror buff will tell you, a certain cinematic evil requires an invitation before it can cross your threshold. While there’s an overlap with this theme, the invitation here is of the matrimonial kind. In fact, there is a generous air of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) in the film’s approach to English stereotypes, with liberal dips into the respective mythologies of Downton Abbey, Eyes Wide Shut and Get Out.
Nathalie Emmanuel (who actually played Maya in the miniseries of Four Weddings) here portrays Evie Jackson, a New York orphan who works in catering and dreams of becoming a successful ceramicist. When her best friend Grace (Courtney Taylor) suggests she takes a DNA test after the death of her mother, Evie is surprised by the result – she appears to be the cousin of an English aristocrat, Oliver L. Armstrong III (Hugh Skinner), who convinces her to fly over to Yorkshire to attend a family wedding. Once there, she’s put up at the local mansion and falls for the charms of Walter Deville, the ‘Lord of the Manor’ (Thomas Doherty), who looks like a young Sean Connery and boasts a six pack and one of the largest fortunes in the world. “Old money – England’s full of it,” explains Oliver.
All this is quite amusing, in a Mills & Boon sort of way, and plods along nicely once the dreadful prologue has been forgotten. But then The Invitation keeps on remembering that it’s a horror film and the fun stops dead in its tracks. It’s actually quite hard to read the film’s tone. It’s so full of horror clichés that it feels like a parody, in particular of the cheap and fearful horror films mass-produced by Hammer in the 1960s. It does take this aspect extremely seriously (creaking doors, underlit cellars, noisy apparitions). Jump scares are the poor cousins of the exclamation mark in pulp fiction and the film lays them on with abandon. Simple movements are accompanied by sudden crescendos and the characters’ peripheral vision is deficient to a fault.
On the acting front, Hugh Skinner recycles his schtick as the upper-class twit, while Sean Pertwee doesn’t break a sweat as a menacing butler who treats his staff with Gothic disdain. The best of the bunch is Nathalie Emmanuel, who is convincingly American (she was born in Essex) and displays some rather good comic timing. There are some nice pop cultural allusions (Grace to Evie on her departure to England: “If you see Idris Elba, say ‘hi’ from me”), but once the romcom stance is abandoned, the film descends into preposterous and tedious melodrama.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Nathalie Emmanuel, Thomas Doherty, Stephanie Corneliussen, Alana Boden, Hugh Skinner, Sean Pertwee, Courtney Taylor, Carol Ann Crawford, Elizabeth Counsell.
Dir Jessica M. Thompson, Pro Emile Gladstone, Screenplay Blair Butler, loosely inspired by an 1897 novel by Bram Stoker, Ph Autumn Eakin, Pro Des Felicity Abbott, Ed Tom Elkins, Music Dara Taylor, Costumes Danielle Knox, Sound Matt Yocum, Dialect coach Stanley Allen Ward.
Screen Gems/Mid Atlantic Films/Emile Gladstone Productions-Sony Pictures.
104 mins. USA. 2022. UK and US Rel: 26 August 2022. Cert. 15.
