After Abigail, my bestie and I have been hankering for some more vampire movies. And after a bummer of a selection on multiple streaming apps, Netflix pulled through with The Invitation, a 2022 vampire flick that has little to no blood but one of the few gore scenes that make me squirm (it’s nothing too bad, but if you’re like me and stuff with fingernails bothers you, it made me a little tense). And while that might sound like a bizarre take for a vampire pic, the movie works — it’s not the most compelling watch, but it’s got a cool aesthetic. And while that can fall flat, in this case it works.
Our main character Evie recently lost her mother, but finds some distant relatives on the film universe’s 23 and Me equivalent. After her new family whisks her away to England for a family wedding, she meets the lord of the manor, Walter, and they begin a whirlwind romance. However, things take a dark turn when Walter decides to stop keeping secrets from her, leading Evie to fight for her life and the lives of the innocents around her.
The concept is nothing unique, but it has fun playing homage to Dracula and creates a unique little universe. I tend not to love things where vampires can walk around in the sun, and they don’t really explain why they can in this movie except for a little throwaway line of ‘There’s a lot of misconceptions about our kind’. In fact, a lot of this movie is exposition and talking and very little action. Evie is an artist, but we barely see her make art — she sure talks about it a lot though. This is a very wordy movie, not even using the dialogue to dump exposition, they just…talk. And some of the more compelling characters like Evie’s great grandmother really never get the development like they deserve. We are mostly left with hollow shells of characters walking around and they talk a lot.
Yet I still kind of liked this movie?
I can’t tell you exactly why, but I did. I think the lack of gore and focus on elegant vampires was nice, especially when blood sucking monsters usually equates to gorefest. And while we didn’t get a lot of character development, Nathalie Emmanuel is a great leading lady and I hope she does more vampire work — she has the artistic vibe needed to perfectly capture one of my favourite monsters. While I don’t think I would actively seek this movie out again, I don’t think I would turn The Invitation off if I stumbled upon it again. And that has to count for something.