USA. 2022.
Crew
Director – Jessica M. Thompson, Screenplay – Blair Butler, Producer – Emile Gladstone, Photography – Autumn Eakin, Music – Dara Taylor, Visual Effects – Temprimental Films Inc. (Supervisor – Raoul Yorke Bolognini), Special Effects Supervisor – Paul Stephenson, Prosthetic Makeup Designer – Ivan Poharnok, Production Design – Felicity Abbott. Production Company – Screen Gems/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
Nathalie Emmanuel (Evelyn ‘Evie’ Jackson), Thomas Doherty (Walter De Ville), Sean Pertwee (Ren Field), Hugh Skinner (Oliver Alexander), Carol Ann Crawford (Mrs Swift), Alana Bowden (Lucy Billington), Stephanie Corneliussen (Viktoria Klopstock), Tian Chaudhry (Diya – Maid #5), Courtney Taylor (Grace), Scott Alexander Young (Uncle Julius), Ian Lindsay (Great Uncle Alfred), Jeremy Wheeler (Jonathan Harker), Elizabeth Counsell (Mina Harker), Viraq Barany (Emmaline Alexander)
Plot
Evie Jackson is an African-American waitress living in New York. After someone leaves a DNA testing kit after an event, she submits a sample. She is surprised to find a match with British Oliver Alexander who messages saying he wants to meet her. He proves charming and offers Evie a ticket to England for an extended family get-together for the occasion of a wedding. Arriving at New Carfax Abbey, Evie is overwhelmed by the luxury. There she is charmed and romanced by the suave lord of the manor Walter De Ville. However, she discovers that there lies a more sinister purpose behind her being there.
The Invitation – not related or to be confused with Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation (2015) about a sinister cult – is the second feature film from Jessica M. Thompson. Thompson comes from Australia where she made several short films, before making her directorial debut with The Light of the Moon (2017) about a woman piecing life together in the aftermath of a sexual assault. The Invitation came backed by Screen Gems and was given theatrical release where it earned a modest $30 million worldwide.
I am stuck with being unable to discuss The Invitation without talking about its one big twist. If you care enough about preserving this, then read no further as it is impossible to discuss The Invitation as a horror film without giving this away. On the other hand, it is not an especially subtle twist as anyone who has a moderate grounding in the horror genre can guess where everything is going as soon as the film starts conducting some of its namedrops. Essentially, Nathalie Emmanuel works as a waitress in New York City. After signing up with a DNA registry, she finds that she is a relative to a British aristocratic family. She is invited to England and revels in luxury, while being charmed by handsome Thomas Doherty. The big twist [PLOT SPOILERS] is that he turns out to be a vampire and she is intended as his new bride.
The depiction of the world of the De Villes often feels like a caricature of British upper-class privilege made by someone who has never researched it beyond watching a bunch of bodice ripping historical romances. Indeed, when Nathalie Immanuel enters in the world, you cannot help but draw comparisons to Megan Markle’s ill-fated sojourn amid the Royal Family – Nathalie even resembles Megan – even if her fate is more a fantasy where Megan Markle rises up and literally burns the entire aristocracy down. (One where the third act has a former catering waitress improbably gain the instant fighting skills to take down an entire vampire cabal several hundreds of years old).
As the vampire, Thomas Doherty plays impossibly handsome and charming. The film is constructed in much the same way as Twilight (2008) and sequels were (albeit minus the chastity message) where the female protagonist is swept off her feet by a charming man from an incredibly wealthy family who then reveals that he is a vampire. Of course, this is an anti-Twilight where said romantic sensibilities are turned on their head and he turns out to be a savage monster.
This feels like a modern Vampire Film written by someone who hasn’t watched many of the films made in the genre in the last twenty years. The whole Genre Homage thing where we keep encountering characters that have the same names as those in Dracula (1897) (or other vampire works) has become a tedious cliché since about 1999. Moreover, when you start hearing references to Whitby and New Carfax Abbey and characters with names like Ren Field, it tends to give away clues to the film’s one big surprise well before the occasion.
Jessica Thompson claims this was her rewriting of Dracula. Actually, it’s not. It is Blair Butler, who also wrote Hell Fest (2018) and Polaroid (2019), taking a handful of names from the book and giving them an entirely different meaning in her own story. Renfield goes from a lunatic in an asylum to being the head butler of the household; Jonathan Harker and his wife Mina go from the lawyer and his fiancee who become victims of Dracula to aging townspeople who live in fearful servitude to the manor house. Not to mention, naming the antagonist De Ville seems about as heavy-handed a red flag as well naming a cartoon villainess Cruella De Ville.
The aspect that seems to have fascinated Jessica Thompson and Blair Butler is Dracula’s three brides. In any adaptation of Dracula, these are always minor characters who appear in the background and have little significance beyond the one scene where they try to feast on Jonathan before being banished by Dracula. The odd film like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) give them slightly more weight and show them in bed with Dracula but nothing beyond that. In this version, they become the central characters and the story is contorted out of shape where the brides have to belong to a bloodline of families and all three required to join Dracula in a wedding ceremony.
The weirdly surprising thing is that this was not the only film coming out in 2022 about Dracula’s brides. There was also Neil LaBute’s far more charged House of Darkness (2022), which went into release only two weeks after this. Both films readily reinvent the characters in terms of contemporary sexual politics. The Invitation has one of the brides defying and eventually burning down the patriarchal system, while House of Darkness is about the brides turning a man’s words around on himself.
The film comes increasingly ridiculous from about the point where Edward De Ville reveals his hand and the film’s big twist, which comes just after the one-hour point. The big reveal scene collapses into absurdity. That someone would introduce a girl he has slept with for the first time the night before to a dinner party and expect a jocular comment made in bed to become a binding marriage vow (while not even informing the girl that the dinner party is a marriage announcement beforehand) and then that said newbie would not freak out entirely at being forced to watch a maid have her throat slit into a bowl to be handed around for everyone to drink exists in the realm of frankly unbelievable psychology.
Jessica Thompson subsequently released an unrated version of the film, which comes with more blood and more explicit sex scenes.
Trailer here