The Invitation wears its influences on its sleeve. The movie’s moody, successfully spooky opening prologue, which throws viewers headfirst into the abandoned halls of a creepy British mansion on one fateful evening, seems like one thing that would have been ripped proper out of a Guillermo del Toro movie. Its premise, in the meantime, feels so strikingly much like that of 2019’s Ready or Not that the YouTube web page for The Invitation’s spoilerific first trailer is full of feedback evaluating the 2 movies.

In a way, there’s one thing endearing about how clearly indebted The Invitation is to filmmakers like del Toro and trendy horror thrillers like Ready or Not. But The Invitation additionally makes a traditional mistake. It is, in spite of everything, generally understood that acknowledging one’s influences is just a good suggestion if you happen to’re able to delivering one thing that also feels new and recent. The Invitation doesn’t handle to do both. Instead, the formidable, overlong new movie packs neither the chunk nor the thrills current in so lots of its style predecessors.

That’s to not say The Invitation doesn’t attempt to convey one thing new to its acquainted vampire story. Rather than adopting the angle of its central vampires or going down in a previous model of Transylvania, The Invitation begins in modern-day New York City and follows Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel), a struggling artist who makes a dwelling working the sort of catering gigs that pressure her to navigate crowds of endlessly impolite, handsy elites. Evie’s life is turned the other way up, nevertheless, when she participates in a 23andMe-esque DNA testing program that reveals her ancestral connection to a rich household primarily based in England.

When one in all her British cousins reaches out and invitations her to a household wedding ceremony, Evie flies throughout the pond within the hopes of getting the U.Ok. journey that she and her late mom all the time wished to take collectively. After she arrives, Evie shortly finds herself being courted by Walter (Thomas Doherty), the good-looking proprietor of the spectacular British mansion the place the movie’s central, mysterious wedding ceremony is being held. However, as she begins to fall for him, Evie begins to suspect that Walter could also be harboring some darkish, ugly secrets and techniques.

It shouldn’t come as a lot of a shock or spoiler to say that Evie’s suspicions are well-founded. The movie’s opening flashback sequence makes that totally clear, however The Invitation nonetheless makes an attempt to attract out all of its very apparent mysteries for so long as it will probably. As a outcome, the movie shortly begins to really feel overlong and repetitive all through its second act, which often jumps between scenes of Evie and Walter flirting with one another and standalone sequences during which sure unlucky victims discover themselves trapped alone in rooms with mysteriously cloaked figures.

Director Jessica M. Thompson, who co-wrote the movie’s screenplay with Blair Butler, makes an attempt to wring as many bone-rattling scares out of The Invitation’s uncommon horror sequences as doable. However, Thompson’s compelled to take action whereas maintaining the identities of sure characters unknown, which ends up in a number of of The Invitation’s scariest sequences being severely underlit. That element, mixed with the precise infrequency of the movie’s slasher sequences, lessens the affect of lots of The Invitation’s scariest moments.

For her half, Nathalie Emmanuel turns in an enthralling and likable efficiency as the lady on the middle of The Invitation’s gothic plot, however she’s not in the end given sufficient to do within the movie. That’s as a result of The Invitation chooses to spend extra time growing Walter and Evie’s predictably problematic romance than on her makes an attempt to outlive the terrifying state of affairs that she finds herself trapped in. Not solely does that inventive choice result in many sections of The Invitation changing into unbearably uninteresting, however it additionally prevents Emmanuel from getting to completely discover the darker psychological locations her character goes within the movie’s third act.

If The Invitation’s closing part have been extra satisfyingly visceral or stunning, the slow-burn nature of its first two acts may not be as damaging to its general high quality. But The Invitation in the end pulls its punches, delivering a climax that’s rushed and jam-packed with expositional information dumps. The movie’s eventual decision comes too shortly and too simply to be a satisfying payoff to Walter’s drawn-out seduction of Evie, and Thompson and Butler’s script refuses to take pleasure in the identical darkly comedian violence as Ready or Not or the deliriously gothic sense of romance that Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 vampire traditional Bram Stoker’s Dracula does.

By refusing to take its personal story so far as it ought to, The Invitation finally ends up feeling like a much less eventful, tamer model of the traditional horror films it so clearly needs to honor. It spends a lot of its runtime dancing round its varied mysteries that the movie by no means will get to be as gory or scary because it should be. For most of its story, the gothic brutality promised by its memorable opening sequence solely ever pops up in brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them bursts.

The infectious hysteria of the movie’s prologue is just reached once more through the memorably bloody banquet sequence that kicks off The Invitation’s third act. Coming off an hour’s price of build-up, the scene is refreshingly blunt and blood-soaked, however Thompson and Butler’s script additionally stops it from escalating right into a full-fledged horror present.

The identical will be stated for the whole lot of The Invitation, which seems like a vampire film that has had its feigns filed down. It might exist in the identical style because the movies it was influenced by, however it’s not sharp or efficient sufficient by itself to really draw blood.

The Invitation hits theaters on Friday, August 26.

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