When Will (Logan Marshall-Green) is invited to a dinner party at his ex-wife Eden’s (Tammy Blanchard) house it’s hard to imagine what could go wrong beyond some hurt feelings and the rekindling of old arguments. Yet even surrounded by friends and plied with nice whiskey, Will can sense something wrong. Are these just the confused feelings of a man too used to tragedy or is that the actual threat of violence hanging over the party like a dark cloud? By end of The Invitation all is revealed, but the journey itself is an unnerving exploration of human paranoia, dissembling and ideological mania.
We spoke with The Invitation director Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body) and co-writer Phil Hay (Clash of the Titans, Ride Along) about the movie’s tricky balance of menace, grief and the human inclination to twist ourselves into horrible shapes to cope with tragedy and our own mortality.
After The Invitation is over, and you’ve taken a few moments to stop quivering, your thoughts may turn to the construction of the tightly coiled suspense that just unwound in front of your eyes. How is it possible to wring so many dark emotions and shivers of horror out of a single location and a yuppie dinner party?
“Because it’s done on such an intimate scale the responsibility to be extremely precise is even higher,” Hay said. “This is a movie that can’t be loose, because it has to drive itself in an unconventional way. Not through events, but through character, behavior, suspicion.”
At the start of the movie Will hasn’t seen his ex-wife in months, their original parting caused by an incomprehensible tragedy. Will finds Eden with a new man, David ( Game of Thrones’ Michiel Huisman), and a new outlook on life far cheerier than his own.
“I loved the script as soon as I read it because I saw this emotional terrain playing as kind of like paranoid genre filmmaking,” Kusama said.
Grief motivates Will’s mounting paranoia that all is not as it seems at the dinner party. Still climbing out of a pit of emotional despair, Will is exposed and raw, ringing with suspicion of everyone and everything. Whether his paranoia is a symptom of tragedy or a bellwether of danger is one of the central questions cranking The Invitation forward.
“I identified really strongly with Will's new state of mind being hyper-vigilance, this sense that anything is possible at any second. Danger lurks in every corner. Violence is possible out of the air. That's just how he walks in the world,” Kusama said.
A reaction requires a stimulus, so while Will may or may not be right about the trap he believes is closing around him (simply locking a door puts Will on edge), there’s definitely something odd afoot. Eden and her new partner David have embraced a strange New Age ideology that combines unnerving openness (particularly about suffering) with the kind of gee-shucks goodness we’ve come to expect from Broadway Mormons.
The most unnerving presence in The Invitation is John Carroll Lynch as Pruitt, a new friend of David and Eden’s with a looming stature and what Kusama called “a kind of serenity, a sense of ‘I’m doing what I need to be doing.’”
But for every push toward Will’s darkest imaginings, The Invitation presents an alternate possibility. You’ve met someone like David. “He would totally embrace people he’s never met and have them squirming in his grip. But he’s not aware of that, because he’s just giving so much of himself,” Kusama said. He’s the kind of person who makes you feel bad about yourself, his cloying goodness half-convincing you that you’re to blame for feeling uncomfortable.
It’s a tricky balancing act that The Invitation navigates to perfection. Are these uncomfortable moments in awkward social situation or something more?
Hay said, “that's in a way what the movie's about, the danger of how these ideas can kind of--”
“--Corrupt you,” Kusama finished.
“And all of the sudden you're not in control of your own existence anymore,” Hay said.
The Invitation is out in theaters on April 8.
