Haruki Murakami said in a New Yorker interview last year that “There are three types of emotional wounds: Those that heal quickly, those that take a long time to heal,and those that remain with you until you die. I think one of the major roles of fiction is to explore as deeply and in as much detail as possible the wounds that remain”.
These ‘wounds that remain’ would be an apposite way to describe the emotional core of The Invitation and also how it affects one of the central themes of the film, perception versus reality. The film opens with a couple in a car, Will and Kira (played by Logan Marshall-Green & Emayatzy Corinealdi), driving to a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills hosted by Will’s ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband, David (Michiel Huisman).
Whilst driving on the way to the party, a coyote pops out of nowhere and they hit it: Mortally wounded, Will reluctantly takes a tyre iron to the coyote and kills it.
The Reality & the Fantasy
It’s a startling way to open a film but by the end, the opening scene makes much more sense in context: that the sometimes sudden and difficult circumstances we face in life can’t be avoided or ignored because if we do, we’re doomed to a counterfeit life of quick fixes and instant gratification. Running from the hard reality will just make it worse in the long run.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Will and his journey in the film is that he’s faced this reality and you can see it on his weary, bearded face and tired eyes. His reality is that the son he and Eden had together died tragically and whilst the specifics of the tragedy are never revealed, it’s clear Will holds himself responsible.
Eden, when we eventually meet her, appears glamorous and carefree; as if nothing has happened in the two years since they lost their son.
The Invitation & the Social Media age
In a certain sense, The Invitation can be seen as the perfect metaphor for the social media age; Will’s perception of the whole evening is that something is off, from Eden’s strangely serene demeanour to her husband’s insistence on locking the doors under the guise that there’s been a string of burglaries in the area: We present ourselves as one thing but is there something underneath that we’re hiding?
The face we present on Facebook and Twitter is not necessarily synonymous with who we are in real life or what we really think. Deception is de rigeur on social media.
And therein lies the central conflict of the film and social media for that matter: can we trust what we’re seeing or is it merely a phantasm of reality, a reality that looks good but hides something troubling? What if we doubt it and what are the consequences of that versus not doubting it and just accepting what we see?
Will is an almost wraith-like presence in every scene, constantly questioning and poking at something he believes to be not only a masquerade but something very wrong.
Grief’s Im pact & Gaslighting
Has grief turned Will into some paranoid shell of a human? That’s the implication here in The Invitation as when Will questions the motives of Eden and David, they essentially take part in gaslighting him by asking how he’s handling things, telling him he’s agitated and another friend even tells him that he’s got to “stop acting so fucking weird as you’re freaking people out!”.
Almost every other guest, including Will’s girlfriend, largely accept the evening at face value, barely raising much of an eyebrow at some strange and troubling things. There is a confessional quality to the events of the film and at one point, Eden’s husband David says: We’ve all been through horrible things but those things don’t have to define us.”
There is certainly truth to that, but it’s also somewhat hollow coming from David -an ex coke-addict and record producer- as we find out he still keeps some spare cocaine around after eulogising how free he is of pain and conflict.
Something not talked about openly on social media is how much is performance versus felt experience? Are we doing what we’re doing because it looks good to a watching audience or are we doing it because we really truly feel something? If it’s performance, then the question must be asked, what’s our motive?
The simple answer could be attention and in The Invitation, the answer is attention, kind of, but it’s a little more nuanced and twisted than that.
There’s no Simple Answers
Without giving too much away, the ending of the film can serve as a warning that when we don’t face reality, delusion sets in. And much like with social media, real life can become an echo chamber where amplification and distribution of extreme and toxic ideas run riot and we can’t tell what’s harmful to others, let alone what’s harmful to ourselves.
In the most emotionally heartfelt and beautifully shot moment of the film, Will confesses to Kira about how he’s feeling and he’s not doing it for attention or to unsettle her; he’s doing it to communicate.
“I’m not okay…my son is dead. Where do I put that?”
Will ( Logan Marshall-Green )
When he tells her that he’s “been waiting to die since the moment it happened”, it opens up a moment between Will and Kira where she takes his hand and tells him that they can move forward together without betraying the memory of Will’s dead son. Will tells her that he loves her but he’s not sure she can help him.
It’s devastating, heartbreaking and raw, but it also shows that there is no real answer to how might we deal with “the wounds that remain”. The Invitation and this moment in particular between Will and Kira speaks to a silent, nocturnal deal that we all don’t so much have to make as acknowledge; there is no growth or enlightenment without pain. The hope, maybe, is in the acknowledgement of it.
It’s OK not to be OK and what’s more, it’s OK to say it out loud. Scream it if you have to.
The Invitation is currently streaming on Netflix (UK&Ireland)
