The Invitation (2022) - review

When you think of vampire movies, you may think of Twilight or Dracula with the drama and the love and very little horror elements and gore but what if I told you there was a happy medium between the lovey dovey stories and the horror and eerie stories of the horror genre.

This, friends, is the Invitation. I consider this film a guilty pleasure of a horror movie and a bad drama. It's a PG-13 rated movie, so of course it's not going to be anything uber gory or violent in nature, but I think this one pushes the boundaries a bit more than one would expect from a PG-13 movie of this sort.

This story follows a young woman named Evie who finds out that she has long-lost relatives from England and is invited by her distant cousin to attend a family wedding at a very old estate. Evie begins to fall in love with the Lord of the estate, and then stuff gets creepy and weird. I'll say this right off the bat: the film is rated a 31% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.3/10 on Google Reviews, but I don't think it deserves those harsh reviews at all. Is it amazing? Absolutely not, but is it a fun, kinda sexy, PG-13 horror vampire movie? Yeah, and for what it is, I think it's pretty great! The acting stands out to me the most, and the world-building makes sense as to why Evie is so important to the whole thing going on in England, and the costumes are amazing, and so are the sets. It's a modern horror-drama film with gothic elements, and I love myself a gothic horror!

The only thing I'll say about where the film misses is that it will very much date itself in the future. What I mean by that is, some of the humor is very relevant to the first few years that the film was out in the world, but that humor will become pretty cringey as time goes on. They make one humorous reference with one of Evie's costumes in the beginning of the film when she's getting ready for bed and face timing her friend back home in NYC and she's wearing an Outlander shirt. If you aren't aware of what Outlander is, it's a TV show (that I adore) about a young woman in the fall of World War II who gets sucked back into 17th century Scotland and falls in love with a Scotsman in the past. The core of the show is about finding love far away from your physical home but also your comfort zone which is very much the theme of The Invitation but that reference already stumps people and they don't get it and the movie came out like 3 years from writing this and I don't feel like it's going to age very well and just look cringey in a few years. The other thing that just won't age well is the best friend interludes in the film. Evie's best friend seems to constantly call her and Facetime her to ground us back into reality and make some joke that doesn't quite land and feels awkward to listen to given the other visuals and feel of the scenes in which it happens. I appreciate the filmmakers trying to create that groundedness and introduce that type of new age millennial/Gen-z humor into a story like this but it doesn't really work for me.

There's very little I can say without getting right into the spoilers so you've been warned and even though the ratings say differently, I recommend that you give this one a try. It only takes about 10 minutes of basic story setup and one exposition dump to get the story rolling pretty quickly so I think it's worth at least 15 minutes of a watch and if you don't like it, that's cool but even if you're just the least bit curious, please finish it! The Invitation is 1hr and 44 minutes long but feels like it moves pretty quickly through the story.

The Invitation Theatrical Poster

So the Lord of the estate that Evie falls for is actually an ancient vampire who takes wives for their pure blood of mortal families that support his legal affairs, money, and real estate. All right, that's kind of cool, in my opinion. Walt already gives off that weird energy right from the start, and you can kind of feel it from his first appearance that something's off, so it's not a total shock to the system, but it's still kind of a "well that went from 0 to 10 real fast" kind of reveal.

There are two other "wives" bound to Walt, Viktoria and Lucy. Viktoria seems to have been turned by Walt in the 1800's ish while Lucy was bound to Walt in the 1920's and now Evie should complete the triad of powerful wives to the all-powerful vampire lord guy. But she doesn't, and I think the way she gets herself out of that whole situation was pretty genius in all honesty, and the fight sequence between Viktoria and Evie was pretty cool and the same with Walt. I do have to say, though, the injured and ancient-looking version of Walt looks identical to the unmasked version of the Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera, and I can't NOT think that every time I watch the movie.

One of my favorite parts of the movie was Lucy; she was so wholesome and naive to every part of the evil plan Evie was being primed for, and genuinely just wanted to have Evie as a friend and as she often said, "A sister" of sorts. Lucy was my favorite part of the film and while I think it'd be a cool anthology series to follow each of the three brides and get a film on each one of their journeys, I do appreciate that Lucy and Viktoria didn't steal too much attention away from the real meat of the story. Viktoria was moreso just annoying to me and was like the ultimate evil step-sister to Evie's Cinderella and while visually, Viktoria was intimidating and the actress was phenomenal in portraying a catty and elegant vampire lady, it was like an eye-roll every time Viktoria was on screen. She was also a big bully to Lucy, and when Lucy fought back and killed Viktoria to defend Evie in the end, I was sad that Lucy had to die but saw it coming but I was also glad she stood up to Viktoria final,y and I thought Lucy had a well-rounded end to her story.

My only other issue besides the humor dating the film is the pacing of the final act. From the moment at the dinner table where it all clicks into place for Evie that she is going to bed sold to Walt as his third bride and turned into a vampire, it all just feels so rushed. Her multiple escape attempts, her little moment with Walt before the wedding/ceremony where the audience gets to find out how "evil" and "bad" Walt is because he eats a maid's leg then we go right into the final part with the ceremony and the fight scenes and then boom, were done.

Overall, I give The Invitation (2022) a 7/10