Director/Screenplay – Duncan Birmingham, Producer – Mary Pat Bentel, Photography – Bruce Thierry Cheung & Chananun Chotrungroj, Music – Team Lovett, Production Design – Jade Spiers. Production Company – Lighthouse Entertainment/Shudder.
Ryan Hansen (Adam), Melissa Tang (Margo), Timothy Grananderos (Tom), Perry Matfield (Sasha), Tipper Newton (Teeny), Kalo Moss (Dylan)
Husband and wife Adam and Margo have brought a house going cheaply in the Canyon Heights neighbourhood. What Adam has not told Margo is that they were able to buy the house at a bargain rate because a family was murdered there seventeen years earlier. After the party winds down, they find two guests still there, although realise they hadn’t been invited by either of them. The other two introduce themselves as Tom and Sasha, the next-door neighbours. As the four of them settle in to party some more, Tom and Sasha start to push Adam and Margo’s buttons in dangerous ways.
Who Invited Them was a directorial debut for Duncan Birmingham, previously a writer on tv shows such as Maron (2013-6) and Blunt Talk (2015-6). The film premiered on the Shudder network.
Who Invited Them is a Home Invasion film. At least I should qualify that by adding ‘of sorts’. One needs put out of mind the immediate association that that creates with The Strangers (2008) and a bunch of films that subsequently copied that with faceless strangers in animal masks terrorising a regular family. Here the duo of invaders are young smiling and perfectly friendly millennials, who claim to be the next-door neighbours. Their weapons are charm and being able to turn secrets and divisions within the marriage against the host couple.
Who Invited Them works with a certain slick polish. I was reminded of Speak No Evil (2022), a nasty edge-pushing Danish film about a regular family who go to stay with another family but seem too polite to do anything as the hosts keep stepping well over civilised boundaries. I also kept flashing back to Cheap Thrills (2013) where a wealthy couple taunt a couple of losers with games that push them over the edge – here it is the guests here who challenge the couple with games but there is a very similar feel in the scenes with Ryan Hansen and Melissa Tang punching one another and being challenged to have more drinks.
Ryan Hansen and Melissa Tang fail to fully convince as a couple. The bickering is convincing enough but the other side of it, any sense of what binds them together, seems missing. On the other hand, as the neighbouring couple, Timothy Grananderos and Perry Matfield play smooth, cattily savage and urbane. Who Invited Them is not a great film but it does what it does efficiently. Even if you can see many of its plot points being set up in advance, Duncan Birmingham does delivers one or two decent twists.
Trailer here