‘The Invitation’ Trailer: Welcome to the Dinner Party From Hell

I don’t like dinner parties.

They make me uncomfortable. I’m not great at meeting new people. I’m terrible at remembering names, and I’m a really bad conversationalist when I don’t have a shared language like movies or comics to fall back on. So even before the actual horror, The Invitation is already my nightmare. A dinner party where a guy has to endure an evening with his ex-wife, her new husband, and all her friends? And then you mix in some serious scares? Yeah, no thank you. I’d like to sleep again at some point this century.

Here’s the film’s official plot synopsis:

In this taut psychological thriller by Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Jennifer’s Body), the tension is palpable when Will (Logan Marshall-Green, Prometheus) shows up to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard, Into the Woods) and new husband David (Michiel Huisman, Game of Thrones). The estranged divorcees’ tragic past haunts an equally eerie present; amid Eden’s suspicious behavior and her mysterious house guests, Will becomes convinced that his invitation was extended with a hidden agenda. Unfolding over one dark evening in the Hollywood Hills, THE INVITATION blurs layers of mounting paranoia, mystery, and horror until both Will — and the audience — are unsure what threats are real or imagined.

I haven’t seen The Invitation yet, but our own Britt Hayes has. Here’s a brief excerpt from her extremely positive 9/10 review here at the site:

But The Invitation elicits — and invites — cringes of dread, not empathetic humor, as we anticipate what horrors friendly patience and good humor hath wrought. In contrast to a typical comedy of errors, The Invitation may very well be the first horror of manners.

Britt also put The Invitation on her list of the best horror films from Fantastic Fest 2015. That’s enough to get me seriously interested, even if the whole idea of this movie scares me to death. The Invitation opens in theaters and on VOD on March 25.