Review of The Invitation (2016) by Shininglion — 09 Oct 2020

Repulsively boring and unattractive character writing that leads to all the utterly predictable places. The scenes of madness near the end were choreographed pretty well in that they felt more realistic than rehearsed, so there's a gritty quality to it, but it's all a bit too "sniffing our own farts out of a wine glass" for me.

I skipped through nearly the first half of the movie because the characters were just so bland and I knew the dialogue wouldn't even be important. I was right. Still 100% understood the story, and glad I spent less than an hour on this movie instead of its full run time.

A major problem with this film is that it starts out with grim music and tone before things even get grim... so tonally the film goes nowhere. It starts and ends with paranoia and bleakness and we never see any lighter moments to even convince us for a moment that this might end well.

Duh. The directors need to go back to film school. Also that ending was ridiculous and dumb. A page out of Shyamalan's wastebasket.