Do you trust your ex? How much? Enough to accept The Invitation to dinner? Enough to put up with the new person living in your house? Enough to tolerate an infomercial for a cult solicitation? What?!
Will (Logan Marshall-Green) doesn’t know there’s something more than dinner involved when he accepts an invitation to a house he lived in for several years. Have you ever been invited back to your own house? That’s kinda weird. But the weird doesn’t stop there. The group of aggressively diverse old friends has graduated from easy-going to mildly suspicious. Why
here? Why now? Has Will seen his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) since the death? And what’s with locked doors and the bars on the windows?
Like few films before it, The Invitation is a study in solipsism. The camera always finds Will and Will’s perspective. Oh, hey, there’s a guest only Will can see … and she forgot to dress tonight. Well, that’s unusual. Will himself periodically needs time away from the gathering of old friends. He’s apprehensive and puzzled by a nagging feeling that something is wrong. The camera almost always follows him and his isolation rather than showing us what’s going on away from Will. This way, we know exactly what Will knows and essentially nothing else. It’s only a matter of time before the cult intro video is pulled out. Is this the recovery path for Will as it seems to be for Eden? Or is this just the culmination of weird? How well does he know this group he abandoned not-so-long ago?
Although not quite as good, The Invitation makes a great companion piece to Coherence, another bizarre dinner-party-with-friends evening. Coherence presented more of straightforward 
mystery while The Invitation, mysterious in its own right, is more of a modern reflection. Invitation describes a sort of new existentialism where everybody seems to know what’s best for everybody else. And the film constantly comes back to trust. What, exactly, do you trust? And why? Do you believe old friends have your best intentions at heart or is there an evil within deception?
I’m afraid this film asked a great deal more questions than it answered, but I like films to do that. What’s the point in shooting down all the aliens and never wondering where they came from or why they were motivated for genocide in the first place? At its core, The Invitation is just a dinner party with thirtysomething adults sharing wine and cake. That’s not gonna do it for a lot of you. But if you enjoy questioning your reality like I do, you could do worse … or could you?
♪I remember loving life
When I still had a wife
We would take a bath
Sorrow we did lack
Laughing all the time
Rose-colored flashback
Coming back to here today
Definitely should say, “no way.”
Looking at my friends
All seated in the den
I never realized
How creepy until then, oh Eden
Well you asked me to come to this party
But you had agenda, oh Eden,
I suck at slick repartee
And I kinda hate Dave, today♫
Not Rated, 100 Minutes
D: Karyn Kusama
W: Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi
Genre: The f***ed-up dinner party
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Conspiracy theorists
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: People who trust
♪ Parody inspired by “Mandy”
