Director Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation starts with a death – specifically, a man (Logan Marshall Green) having to put a coyote out of its misery after hitting it with his car. It’s a mercy killing, but it leaves the man, Will, burdened with guilt and sorrow. And he’s already been burdened with so much of each over his life. He hopes the night will get better from there. But it won’t. Upon arrival at his former home, now owned by his ex-wife and her new husband, Will is forced to confront his grief and his past.
The Invitation is a story of anxiety and trauma, or at least it felt that way when it went wide in 2016. Ten years have passed, and what, on paper, seemed like the story of friends fighting to stay alive against a cult now has a more insidious vibe. The Invitation now feels like the story of one sane man trying to navigate a group of people trying to stay polite in the face of overt insanity. That’s to say it feels like a movie that prophesied our current political times.
“It's more relevant because we're seeing evidence of what an anti-feeling culture is,” Kusama tells FANGORIA. “I think The Invitation was trying to explore a state of being that is a kind of sickness, where you bury the realities of your life and your past…It's almost like we're in, not just denial of ourselves and our personal histories, we're just in denial of history.” It is that sense of denial that permeates the movie once Will and his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Will spends the dinner party he’s supposed to be a part of just wandering his old house, remembering the times when he and his ex, Eden (Tammy Blanchard) were happy, before their son died in a tragic accident. And while Eden seems to be thriving, it’s obvious she’s struggling to maintain the facade, for reasons that become apparent towards the end of the film but stem from a cult, called The Invitation, she’s joined.
The Invitation, for over an hour of its runtime, feels less like a horror movie and more a psychological meditation on trauma. Kusama herself compares it more to the work of German-Austrian director Michael Haneke where “you're watching something that feels real, but then the screws get tightened,” Kusama says. In this case, Will starts to become increasingly anxious that something is wrong. That Eden and her new husband David (Michiel Huisman) are hiding something. That something bad is going to happen. It’s hard not to watch that in today’s landscape where those feelings are omnipresent, that something terrible is coming just around the corner to join the other cavalcade of horrors already begun.
This culminates with Will, desperate to get everyone to stop acting so nonchalant about everything and admit things are weird. He declares that he thinks Eden and David might be trying to kill them, and that it’s possible one of their friends – who hasn’t arrived at the party – is already dead. Cut to said friend walking in the door and immediately taking the wind out of Will’s sails. It’s this moment that makes The Invitation feel like an extension of 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a movie that pointedly poked at the rise of McCarthyism. Here, Will’s claims that things aren’t normal and people should care about that rings all too true in a world where people are being killed in the street by paramilitary forces.
It’s a vibe Kusama has seen develop recently, and noticed on full display during a screening six months ago at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles. “It was pretty interesting to see how it played almost more like a politically charged film, even though that was not the intent when we were making it. But the notion of people losing their identities to a death cult, plain and simple – we're living that now, and that's pretty wild.”
Divorced from this political landscape, The Invitation’s presence as an L.A. movie – the dinner party takes place high up in the Hollywood hills – keeps it relatable, especially in a post-pandemic world. “We were totally hoping that, or still hold out hope that, it will be seen as an LA movie,” says Kusama. “There's always been people flocking to L.A. to trust in a different system. It could have happened in all kinds of places, and we even talked about that probably at some point, like, could we do this in the suburbs of Ohio or upstate New York? But just the physical thing of driving up those hills. You don't know what's coming at you because they're so winding, and the streets are poorly marked, and it's increasingly away from civilization.”
It’s impossible not to think of this taking place in Los Angeles, specifically considering its ending. The final thirty-odd minutes take things into horror mode, with Will and Kira fighting to survive The Invitation’s murder/suicide plan. Though the pair survive, they look across the L.A. basin and see a swath of red lanterns, indicative of how many people are doing the same thing as part of The Invitation. It’s a chilling moment on two levels. One being that Will’s anxieties are now all-consuming. He will never feel safe anywhere again, whether subconsciously or not. To our current times, it also speaks to our own fears of how pervasive a hive-mind is. That so many people we don’t know believe what is happening now is okay and justified.
For Kusama, that scene almost didn’t happen in the way it was supposed to. “It was always the most crucial thing, or certainly one of the most crucial things about the movie,” Kusama explains. “We were shooting in a house at the top of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland that didn't fully look out at the L.A. basin. We had to build some of it.”
It’s a moment that brings the power of The Invitation to full force. Rewatching it now, ten years later, it’s hard not to feel it was on the fringe of something that we’re only seeing bear fruit today. The best movies can do that, stand on the knife’s edge of predicting what is going to happen while being timeless for whatever era it’s watched in. Watching Will try to grapple with his uncertain future, and the future of the world, certainly felt telling at the time, but it hits even harder today.
