The Uninvited Review: Unexpected Guest Sparks Uncomfortable Emotions at Hollywood Party.
Debut feature film from writer-director Nadia Conners is a lively portrait of aging, insecurity and womanhood.
“I thought I’d age well. In fact, I thought I’d never age at all.” Those are the first words The Uninvited’s protagonist Rose (Elizabeth Reaser) utters, while examining her face in the bedroom mirror inside her idyllic Los Angeles home. Her moment of self-reflection is shattered seconds later, when husband Sammy (Walton Goggins) bursts in, itching for an argument. It is these two elements, moments of existential contemplation mixed with comedic bickering, that characterise writer-director Nadia Conners’s first feature film.
While the humour often falls a little flat, it is in the quieter, self-reflective instances that The Uninvited excels.
The entire film takes place within Rose and Sammy’s white-walled Spanish style villa, where they are throwing an extravagant party. They’ve got all the Hollywood essentials - a spread of fancy food, $400 bottles of whiskey and a photographer with a special booth set up to capture each guest’s ‘aura’. And of course, the customary self-absorbed movie star guests - as well as two unanticipated arrivals. First, the ninety-year-old Helen (Lois Smith), who’s convinced that she lives at Rose’s house. Shortly after, dishevelled bad-boy actor Lucian (Pedro Pascal) swaggers in, a former romantic partner of Rose who still hasn’t shaken his feelings for his one time co-star.
The two arrivals, visions of a melancholy future and an alluring alternative past, bring the other characters’ struggles into focus, forcing them to confront the regrets and insecurities plaguing their personal and professional lives.
Conners originally wrote The Uninvited as a stage play, and as a result, some dialogue feels out of place on the big screen. Expressive monologues sometimes come at the cost of visual storytelling, and when Rose and Sammy argue they trade witty, yet ultimately hollow insults that feel as though they might have been borrowed from a 90s sit-com. While there are one or two laugh out loud moments in these farcical exchanges, it feels as though Conners was generally playing it safe by basing much of the comedy around familiar themes: a bickering couple and narcissistic Hollywood actors.
While the theatrical origins of the script might detract in some areas, it also provides one of The Uninvited’s greatest strengths - the single location setting.
Not only does it create a sense of claustrophobia and chaos, with various combinations of invited and uninvited guests bumping into each other throughout, but the house becomes a kind of prison for Rose. As the guests mingle by the salt-water swimming pool outside, expressing their admiration for Rose’s past acting performances, she is stuck in the house playing the role of mother to her son and host to an elderly stranger. It’s a pointed comment not only on the role of women in the film industry, but the wider change in attitude towards women as they age.
The decision to make this party cross-generational, with characters from nine to ninety, is an effective one. It forces characters to confront their future challenges as well as their present ones. Delia is concerned about her future as a potential mother after seeing Rose, and Rose and Sammy have to consider their own mortality when confronted with the elderly Helen. Rather than offering a neatly-wrapped solution to their problems, The Uninvited presents life as an inescapable cycle, with each generation naively stumbling into the same problems as their elders did before them.
As you leave the cinema, it’s difficult not to get a little existential, reflecting on your own life and place in this cycle.
Ultimately, while The Uninvited feels a little rough around the edges, superb performances from Reaser and Goggins, combined with a willingness to tackle tricky themes head-on, makes this a solid debut feature for Conners.
The Uninvited opens in cinemas on 9th May.