After taking a DNA ancestry test, Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel) is contacted by a long-lost cousin, Oliver (Hugh Skinner) who wants to meet her when he comes to NYC.  Over a fancy lunch, Oliver invites Evie to a lavish wedding in a few weeks, back in England.  Hesitating, she eventually agrees and is stunned when she arrives at the sprawling estate.  The Lord of the Manor, Walter (Thomas Doherty) takes a liking to Evie, and after his persistent courting, she finally gives in to his enchantment.  This honeymoon phase of flirtation ends quickly when Evie begins to suspect that she was not brought here just to be a part of the family celebration but for reasons far more sinister. 

In Jessica M. Thompson’s The Invitation, written by Blair Butler, the pair seeks to thrill with a story that highlights the romantic side of the vampire myth, with all of its gothic elegance, while also bringing the narrative to the modern day.  The blend of romance and horror is nothing new, and can create a lush landscape for large feelings to mix with larger freights, but The Invitation, while it sets the stage for a larger story, feels lacking in its second act. 

The film opens with lots of intrigue as a woman clutches a bust before hanging herself from the balcony railing.  While the details around this cold open will be revealed in time, the filmmaking far outreaches the narrative.  There is every indication in the camera angles and movement, and the pacing of the film, to lead to the conclusion that there will be a massive central mystery, but the big reveal is rather lackluster and does not live up well to the buildup.  There are creepy things happening all around, locked rooms, strange portraits and statues, and a fleet of maids with numbers embroidered on their uniforms so we know that they are destined to become creature fodder as soon as they get off of the van, but much of the second act is taken up by the budding romance between Evie and Walter. 

The few creature moments peppered throughout the film, when all is said and done, do not really make a lot of sense when viewed as pieces of the larger narrative.  There is never any realization made on Evie’s part that the maids are going missing, even though there was a lot of setup to show that Evie sees them as more than just the help of the house.  The disappearance in the wine cellar and the mystery of the library ultimately leads nowhere and are there to pad the runtime with unassociated thrills.  The script does begin to build some intrigue around Walter, but it is far too little and far too late.  The connection across the pond is never clearly made to show the link between the DNA test launch that Evie was catering and Walter’s assets.  Nor does it build upon Oliver’s involvement in real-estate to help lend credence to this being a functioning, global network of oligarchs.   

In the final act when the reveal is made that the two “maids of honor,” Viktoria (Stephanie Corneliussen) and Lucy (Alana Boden), are centuries-old vampire brides of Walter and Evie is a descendent of the ancient bloodline of the third family, it breaks away from is stateliness to get a little gory and grungy as Evie fights her way to freedom.  For a film that feels like it is trying to do something new and exciting with the vampire legends, it relies far too heavily on the various iterations of its source material and results in a murky mess of lore.  There might as not be any rules to the game as it is an anything goes finale full of stakes and fire, and while there are some creative uses of space in the showdown, it was such a chore to get to this point, audiences are not likely to reengage now that the pace has picked up.  

With everything bathed in a blue light, much of Danielle Knox’s costume work and Clare Keyte’s set decoration is lost in the background.  It is an unfortunate trend that runs throughout the film, even in the exterior scenes, that does not make the film feel like an elegant artifact of a bygone time, but it just looks generically ugly.  The Invitation may be trying to breach new ground and do something exciting, but it also feels incredibly misguided and uninspired.  It is a white board full of ideas, but not enough thought was made in how to connect these elements into a cohesive story.  That being said, it feels overly malicious to write this film off simply as the disaster that it is, because its shortcomings do not feel like they were intentionally done, but rather they are the unfortunate result of a lack of self-editing as the story broke and was being put to the page.  Thompson’s direction during the individual sequences all works rather well, but Butler did not provide her with a strong enough narrative to connect everything together and make it greater than the sum of its own parts.