Avis des critiques

Though it debuted about 18 months before the 2016 election, Karyn Kusama’s sinister, rattling The Invitation gets at the tenor of contemporary American life better than any other recent horror film.

A perfectly enjoyable dinner-party-of-the-damned contraption that also increasingly overreached for significance as it went along (an ambition embodied in a final shot that expanded the script's bottle-episode scenario to apocalyptic proportions). But in attempting to do a lot with a little, it captures something of the enduring appeal and importance of horror films, which is that they're ideally suited to punch up from a comparatively low-down purview, in terms of both budget and prestige.

I can't say it's as moving or uncompromising as No Home Movie, or as wholesome as even also-rans like The Family Fang and Louder Than Bombs, but The Invitation is the best time I had in a theater in April. Not that it's joyful—the film plumbs authentic-enough-seeming reserves of grief while ratcheting up an almost unbearable (but pleasurable) tension over the course of one flashback-supplemented dinner party, and leaves you feeling unwell, because it works.

Scarily, the warped philosophical ramblings that Eden, David and Pruitt embody begin to resonate with others, even as Will's distrust for them grows. This might be an instance of polite dinner guests humoring their hosts, but Kusama sees it as just another example of people avoiding the discomfort that's staring them in the face. That's what makes The Invitation so often scary; destructive ideologies can worm their way into any person's brain if they are wrapped in the perfect package.

The threat of physical violence is ever-present, but the true animating violence of The Invitation is emotional trauma. It cuts to the quick, taking precedence over any adherence to decorum.

Although somewhat hampered by an uneven cast and a limited budget (the movie has a digital look that makes faces putty colored and robs them of detail), Ms. Kusama mostly works around her production limitations. The narrative structure helps in this respect, simply because when the camera isn't trained on the group it's often on Mr. Marshall-Green, who creates a complex character who swings, at times violently, between the sympathetic and off-putting.

With "The Invitation," Kusama has returned to a subtler register. Having reworked formulas several times out, she finally heads in a surprising direction... While technically a thriller that dovetails into slasher territory for its third act, "The Invitation" maintains a unique intrigue that constantly defies expectations.

The buildup stretches longer than it should, but the payoff comes with a satisfying bang. Will ultimately isn't the one who puts this party out of its misery, but watching as the atmosphere of decorum explodes into carnage is a rare pleasure, both vindicating and horrifying.

The Invitation doesn't sustain the evening's tension so much as allow you to forget it, subsuming each unsettling occurrence into the stricken whole. Will and Eden's bereavement is itself so inconceivable, to us as to their friends, that any outcome becomes possible. And by the time the climax arrives, culminating in the film's utterly chilling final image, The Invitation externalizes the disquiet that swirls and eddies around all of us.

Karyn Kusama's The Invitation achieves the kind of cinematic alchemy one finds in Blood Simple or the best of Hitchcock, where genre meets philosophy and character to yield something both razor-sharp in its clarity and infinitely complex in its provocations.

Kusama's masterfully tense chattering-class thriller lays bare the divisive valleys between reticent reason and ‘Mansonian' insanity, between open-minded secularism and Kool-Aid imposture, nailing the cult in America's culture wars.

A dinner-party mystery so sweat-inducingly tense that I could only watch it through laced fingers. The less revealed here about its inexhaustibly intriguing, slow-burn plot the better — and Kusama proves withholding to great effect — but suffice it to say that what begins as a somewhat ominous middle-class soiree soon transforms, irresistibly, into something rather more severe.