Some movies just stick in our minds long after first viewing them. Karyn Kusama’s 2015 film The Invitation is one of those for me. Having seen it when it first arrived on streaming services the year of its release, The Invitation has often popped up in my thoughts as a prime example of an under the radar experience that deserves more eyeballs.

Co-written by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, The Invitation is the story of a dinner party attended by Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corineald) at the affluent Hollywood Hills home of Will’s ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband, David (Michiel Huisman). With a group of their old friends also in attendance, alongside some new arrivals, we quickly learn that Will and Eden’s son tragically passed away a few years earlier in an accident that left the parents in shock and grieving. While Eden seems to have moved on with David thanks to a new cultish self-help group called The Invitation, Will continues to be lost in his mourning.

The Invitation is about trauma and grief and isolation, essentially all at the same time. The majority of the film is seen through Will’s eyes, whose pain has left him disconnected from his old friends who are gathered together for the first time in two years and who are all happy to see him amongst the living again. As Will wanders Eden’s home, his former home, flashbacks to happier times intermingle with sadness and death. Those flashbacks are never jarring, and gives both the character and the audience a significant look at the toll grieving takes on us.

Logan Marshall-Green’s excellent performance is the key to The Invitation; he’s in virtually every scene and is the emotional centerpiece of the film. Try as he might to hold back the tears and interact with his friends, Marshall-Green’s Will barely has a handle on his emotions. When the character begins to suspect something isn’t right with Eden and Michael after they reveal their membership to The Invitation, we’re unsure if his fears are based on reality or simply another manifestation of his own pain.

Alongside Logan Marshall-Green, the other standout performance in The Invitation comes courtesy of the great John Carroll Lynch, whose character of Pruitt is a member of The Invitation. Lynch, familiar to fans of David Fincher’s classic true crime film Zodiac, delivers a phenomenal monologue halfway through the film that gives insight into both his character and the mindset of the group that holds sway over Eden and Michael.

Los Angeles is the perfect setting for a film like The Invitation. For decades the city and its environs have been home to all sorts of cult-like behaviour, most notoriously with the Manson Family murders during the summer of 1969. While Manson and company are never referenced in The Invitation, the gorgeous house the film is takes place in feels like a location the Familiy would have abhorred. Interestingly, said house, located at 8105 Mullholland Terrace, is less than 20 minutes away from the former 10050 Ciello Drive, where Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent were killed on the night of August 9, 1969.

The drama of The Invitation occurs mainly indoors; the backyard, with its swimming pool and gorgeous backdrop of the Hollywood Hills, is often used as a respite from the tension director Kusama creates between the walls. It offers moments of stillness, punctuated only with a few soft-spoken conversations and the sound of cicadas. However, at the film’s conclusion, when we’re outside one final time, it’s clear that the silence of the city of night was just an illusion, a harbinger of things to come.

The Invitation is one of those great films that absolutely deserves to be found by a wider audience (and unlike the 2022 film of the same name, there are no vampires.) It’s a slow burn, with tension that continually rises to its intense climax, and will stay with you, long after its final lights flicker out.