Directed by Navin Ramaswaran (Poor Agnes) and written by Monica La Vella, Invited is a found footage horror that plays out entirely from the perspective of a PC screen. I thought the idea behind it was pretty cool, though even with a seventy minute run time it did feel like it slightly outstayed its welcome.
Linda's (Martina Schabron) daughter, Jessica (Beáta Imre) had been travelling around Europe with her best friend Maddy (Mandy Magnan) when she met a Russian man - Adrik (Michael Lake - Blood Child). After a whirlwind romance she decides to head back to Russia with him to get married in his home village. Linda, the now heavily pregnant Maddy, Linda's parents Susan (Kris Langille) and William (Andrew Bee - Mute), Linda's ex-husband James (Sean Irvine) and her son, Logan (Alex Di Brita) all receive a Zoom invite to watch the wedding ceremony. On the day of the wedding they all join the Zoom call, and are instructed to open the special package that each of them were sent, with a small knife and a vial of liquid included within. As part of the ceremony they are instructed to drink from the vial, which they all do, with the exception of Linda who is a recovering alcoholic. The viewers increasingly begin to be concerned with the ceremony, with it beginning to look more and like Jessica has been brainwashed into joining a dangerous cult, and before long all are caught up in horror both distant and much closer to home.
I have a fondness for found footage films that take place entirely from a PC screen, there has been some great entries over the years, with Unfriended the best example I can think of. Invited for the most part remains authentic. Outside of the Zoom call there are private message conversations going on, private video calls, rewatching old videos and searching on the internet, all provided variation which was welcome. There were concessions made to give this more of a film like feel. Most notably is that the movie has a soundtrack to it that the characters in the film are not hearing. It wasn't as distracting as I thought it might be, and it did add tension to some of the scenes. In particular I thought the track that played over the end credits was fantastic, interspersed with real photos that revealed the cult shown within the movie was actually based on a real life one that had operated out of Russia in the distant past. Cults in found footage films also are not something new, The Faith Community springs to mind as one good example. I thought the cult in Invited was an effective one, I just wish it had featured more. It is the catalyst for the horror to come, but large chunks of the movie take place on the Zoom call, which the cult itself are not part of, having not only muted the group so they can't communicate with them, but also leaving them up to their own devices for a huge part of the run-time.
While Linda is the protagonist, the view point occasionally switches outside of her PC screen, but mainly it is her perspective shown. She is set up to be a flawed protagonist, with it revealed early on that she was an alcoholic, and that her disease resulted in a car crash that left her son wheelchair bound, and possibly was the reason that her husband and her are divorced. This made her an interesting character, though due to plot elements, she is increasingly forced to carry the movie, as the other characters for various reasons start being unable to communicate. It led to Linda having to react to events taking place across the various locations the characters are at. You get a feel for her increasing panic, but the character never seemed as distraught as you would imagine she would be in real life. Her mainly reacting on her own led to the later part of the film dragging for me.
There were some decent special effects used, the film was a bit light on blood, but there are some disturbing scenes of body horror that I hadn't expected.
Invited had an interesting idea to it, and I felt that Schabron was a great fit for the flawed protagonist. I loved the cult, but did wish that they had featured more, as they made for more interesting characters than the rest of the cast, the ritual leader (Elena Zavet) in particular really stood out as a captivating character. Invited is out on Blu-ray in a collectible edition, while the film can currently be streamed for free on Tubi!, which is where I watched it.
SCORE:
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