If you hate awkward dinner parties, the setting of The Invitation alone will send you off the deep end. Nearly the entirety of the new film directed by Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Aeon Flux, Jennifer’s Body) takes place inside the gleaming, modern surfaces of a fancy house in the Hollywood Hills. There, a group of friends (?) have been summoned to meet over conspicuously expensive bottles of wine—and a glacially meted out set-up to inevitable disaster.
Even if you skipped the film’s trailer—which is punctuated by screams—the subtext of violence is established in Invitation‘s very first scene, when the protagonist, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) mercy-kills a coyote with a tire iron en route to dinner. Other information comes in fits and starts, with the filmmakers interchanging suspense with a gradual rollout of the obvious—spooning out each foreseeable revelation over a maddening squanderance of time.