De Ville Made Me Do It

Still looking for horror for Ms. Spenser, I queued up The Invitation (2022). She is now wondering whether she should just give up on horror.

It starts promisingly enough, in a spooky old mansion. A young woman is being kept locked up in a room. She escapes and manages to kill herself. Then we go to present day, where we meet the protagonist, Nathalie Emmanuel. She is serving canapes at a tech conference, and not doing it very well. She gets fired, but her friend does score her a DNA test. Her only known family is her recently deceased mother.

The DNA results come back, and she discovers she has a distant cousin in England - Cousin Oliver (wink, nidge). He meets her for lunch in a swanky NY joint, and invites her to a family wedding. He seems nice, disarming and charming, and is offering her a free vacation, a chance to visit England, and to meet family. Also, she's out of work, so...

The wedding is being held at New Carfax Abbey, but fortunately, Emmanuel hasn't read any books or seen any movies, and doesn't think that is odd. It seems nice, but they are pretty rough on the servants. A batch of maids with numbers 1-5 on their pinnies are brought in. Emmanuel tries to treat them as humans, which strikes everyone else as eccentric.

She also meets the bridesmaids, one tall and bitchy, the other smaller and a bit more friendly. And finally. she meets the lord of the manor, young and darkly handsome Thomas Doherty as Walter DeVille. Emmanuel still isn't putting it together. In fact, even though he's a rich entitled twat, which she supposedly doesn't like, she gets quite horned up over him.

So that's the setup. I'll leave the rest out. There is a reasonably clever brides of Dracula plot at work, and it ends with Emmanuel allowing herself to be turned. She does this so she can kill Doherty, which turns her human again, based on Lost Boys rules. Oops, spoiler. And it has the now-classic woman-who-was-supposed-to-be-the-victim-walking-away-from-setting-the-whole-thing-on-fire ending.

I didn't mind that this movie self-consciously used so many tropes and twists: a retainer named Renfield (Sean Pertwee! Thought it was Martin Freeman for a mo), Jonathan and Mina Harker running a shop in town, etc.  Ms. Spenser, on the other hand, thought it was completely stupid. Oh well, better luck next movie.