The Invitation (2022)

Good Help With Good Taste Are So Hard To Find

or

"That's the Whitest Man I've Ever Seen"

 

I'm not a big fan of horror movies and rarely write about them unless there's something that makes the genre rise above the form. I usually confine them to the month of October—Hallowe'en month, of course—when you're SUPPOSED to pay attention to them. The rest of the time...meh...there's enough horror in the world...

 

But, I wanted to see The Invitation for a very specific reason after seeing the previews. I won't say why, because it's irrelevant to the movie, and there's a post I'm doing in October that will explain all. But, I was interested, but not so much that I put off seeing it for a week or two.

 

The Invitation has so many cliche's running through its blood-stream that one can hardly stop giggling all the way through it. First shot—an up-lit "spooky house" with an animated lightning strike (with instantaneous thunder) that lights up the screen. When the lightning strikes twice, we're not in the same place, the flash hiding a cut to the interior, with a soundtrack of creaks, groans, chains (chains?) and distant thunder and every knock on the door spells doom. Director Thompson leans so far into the horror conventions that when something different does happen (the background score even contains a theremin-like melody), you're apt not to believe it.

Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel) is a "caterer" in New York. Actually, she's a waitress, while she working on her MFA in ceramics, like she's going to have a ghost of a chance at that. Anyway, her last job had a goody bag in it with a DNA test, and as her folks are dead, she has a sudden desire to look for family...and to be used in all sorts of criminal investigations. Big surprise, she finds a cousin, Oliver Alexander (Hugh Skinner), who is only too overjoyed to find another relative and insists that she accompany him to a family wedding in England. His treat. 

 

There has to be a movie so she accepts. Horror movies cannot exist if people only do smart things. It's also why democracies are so tenuous.

She's almost a little too American for the family housed at Carfax Abbey (Carfax Abbey...why does THAT sound familiar?), an ancient mansion that appears to be made of white LEGO blocks. She bonds with "the help," is a little clumsy while she goggles at the grandeur of it all, and seems to get on the bad side of butler Mr. Field (Sean Pertwee) when she meets the lord of the mans', Walter De Ville (Thomas Doherty). De Ville is charming in an intense, rather animalistic sort of way and takes a delighted interest in Evie. His approval makes things easier on her when she meets the family, but she is still uneasy. She sees the face of a woman that stares at her in moments of unease. Floorboards creak, the shrikes outside are restless, shadows undulate...and so does the canopy of her bed (are those hands?).

But, Walter is there to soothe with his too-wide smile and his habit of wearing a wife-beater. He seems to be the most sympathetic member of the tri-family, certainly more than cousins Viktoria (Stephanie Corneliussen) and Lucy (Alana Boden)—Viktoria is particularly a jealous sort and Lucy...(wait a minute, Lucy?).

Well, it starts to get a little too familiar...not only between Walter and Evie, who start snogging, but also with the story, which seems to be following the line of a particularly famous horror story, which has been filmed many times and may be owned by another film studio that he is not named.

Sure enough, Walter is He-Who-Cannot-Contractually-Be-Named and his intention is to make Evie his new bride—the others being Viktoria and Lucy. How will she escape her fate? How will it all be resolved? Why doesn't everybody have fangs? Why do they cavort in the day-time? Oh, that's all dispensed with quick shots and some throw-away references to "rumors." Nothing new under the moon. Geez, there aren't even any bats!

What's different is that the story is usually told with a "women are victims" bite, and this one stakes new territory, in the wake of the #metooth movement. Evie—Evie?—is the first woman (well, besides, Buffy) to take an active part in the dispatching of her oppressors. Given that most of the talent behind The Invitation are women, one can only say "it's about damn time." But, whether that becomes a trend...well, this vampire has a long track record. We'll see if that trope stays staked.

Stoker

Gosh, it's October 12th and I haven't started putting up the usual collection of Horror-style movies that have been moldering in the crypt...

Written at the time of the film's release...

 

"Creepy Carrie, Creepy Carrie"
or
There's Just One Hitch...

There is such an air of oppression in Chan-wook Park's Stoker ("from the acclaimed director of Oldboy") that it completely tractors over any pretensions of accomplishing what the intent is...to make a film in the style of Alfred Hitchcock.

Well, to do that you have to have an understanding of what Alfred Hitchcock did as a director...and you also have to have an understanding of what "style" is. Not the stylization of what we see here—all oblique angles  and off-kilter cutting, movie-making that "suggests" a story rather than just coming right out and saying it in movie terms. But, also you have to know that Hitchcock's "thrillers," when he made them, took the opposite tack of Stoker, presenting "normal" life invaded by aberration, rather than making it the norm. Hitchcock might have been obsessed with the creepy, but the gourmand in him knew that a steady diet of it would make it dull.

Which is what Stoker is.

On her 18th birthday, the father of India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) is killed in an automobile accident, devastating her family, and introducing to them her father's brother "Uncle Charlie" (Matthew Goode) at the funeral. Charlie stays with the family inserting himself into every aspect of the Stoker household, still in shock over Richard Stoker's (Dermot Mulroney) death, taking a particular interest in gardening, the servants, and mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). Soon, the head caretaker goes missing, as does great-aunt Gwendolyn (Jacki Weaver), explained away by Charlie, who then turns his laser-like gaze on India.  As is the trait of Uncle Charlies, he sees a kindred spirit in his brother's daughter, and if the man had any sense, he'd be afraid of that, which is the only aspect of Stoker that doesn't pay homage to the Master of Suspense—this is a movie that has no redemption and no hope.

There's a child's primer of Hitchcock throughout: bad "mother" relationships, a creepy "Uncle Charlie," odd dispassionate deaths, the callow, uncomfortable-making young man, the swinging light, the "secret" basement, the masquerading gardening activities, the imposing staircase (circular), the rather irrelevant but "convenient" ability of India. It's a Hitchcock movie for those who've only seen Psycho, and are stuck in that film's deliberate pace and motivation. It's designed to shock, but not to move (and not even out of one's seat...unless of course, it's to walk out).

And there's no humor. Not even a nervous titter. Oh, sure, there is dark "irony" scattered hither and yon with all the subtlety of a hammer swing, but there is no lightness of touch anywhere, not even as an antidote to all the mock serious portent that shrouds the thing, that makes it travel the dead man's walk from too-heavy seriousness to unintended self-parody. It's as if Alan Ball had written Shadow of a Doubt, directed by a too-eager-too-please director who knows nothing about sub-text, and the fun ways that one can infuse the abnormal into normal, or what passes for it.

It's all in the trailer, kids.