Invitation to a Murder (2023)

A group of strangers – among them florist and mystery fan Miranda Green (Mischa Barton) – are invited to the isolated island mansion of an eccentric rich man for reasons nobody involved is clear about. During the proceeding weekend, somebody starts killing people. of course including said rich man.

Miranda just might be the only one able to figure out what’s going on, trained as she is on mystery novels of all shapes and sizes. Plus, the other characters permanently tell her and us how clever she is. They wouldn’t lie to us, right?

Stephen Shimek’s low budget attempt at doing a traditional murder mystery seems heavily inspired by the first two Poirot films of Kenneth Branagh, but doesn’t have the budget or the visual imagination to play on the same field. Which isn’t a problem as such – a country house mystery doesn’t necessarily need much more than a couple of country house sets, an interesting cast, a good script and a director who can get out of the way of what they and the story are doing. Unfortunately, this is not that film.

While the cast of mid-level actors is perfectly alright, as professionals on that level usually are – and Barton makes a more convincing amateur detective than I would have expected – the writing is simply not up to snuff, and Shimek here appears not to be the kind of director able to distract from that sort of thing with visual pizazz.

The film crawls from obvious plot point to obvious plot point at a snail’s pace – even when you’re prepared for the more sedate qualities this kind of mystery can have – and there’s little on screen to keep a viewer’s interest. Certainly not the rote mystery at Invitation’s core; it certainly doesn’t improve the film’s dramatic qualities that Barton’s detective doesn’t actually solve the mystery in the end but gets most of its solution presented to her by a side character. This is not exactly a great way to start a projected series about her adventures, and certainly does not bode well for sequels that may or may not get off the ground.

In short: Ouija House (2018)

Warning: I need to spoil some of the best bits!

Graduate student – we dare not ask of what – Laurie (Carly Schroeder) decides to bring a handful of friends to a supposedly haunted house in the woods her family has somewhat mysterious connections to. It’s all in the hopes of furthering her research so she can graduate, sell her thesis to a publisher who is interested in it, and make enough money to help her mother (Dee Wallace) buy back the family home she just lost. Yeah, I don’t know either, and the film’s explanation for the whole publisher business later on actually makes less sense than what I have just written. But I digress.

Laurie’s aunt Samantha (Mischa Barton) is coming too, for she is fluent in the house’s and her family’s backstory concerning a good and an evil witch cult, baby sacrifice and a bit of nudity. The plan is to hold a traditional séance in the house, but when Laurie finds a ouija board, they just use that. Surprising nobody but the characters, this turns out to be a very bad idea.

For its first half hour or so, Ben Demaree’s Ouija House has all the  hallmarks of mediocre low budget horror made in the 2010s. There are the small and tiny appearances by more or less “name” actors – besides Wallace and Barton, there are also Chris Mulkey, Tiffany Shepis and Tara Reid putting a half day of work or less in –, the boringly generic set-up, and seemingly no interest in trying to lure an audience in with atmosphere and intrigue. However, once the plot gets going, Ouija House becomes a prime example of how a film that’s really not good in a way most people would use the word becomes really rather awesome (in all senses of that word) by throwing all kinds of crazy shit at the audience while keeping a completely straight face. The film gets outright 70s/80s Italian in this regard, therefore charming me to a considerable degree.


Ouija House’s title, you see, is to be taken literally, it turns out, with the letter of a ouija board hidden away behind the titular house’s wallpaper until a possessed member of the crew (very enthusiastically played by Grace Demarco) rips the wallpaper covers off. As you may or may not imagine, there are scenes of a possessed young woman in a state of undress groping and hissing towards the letters painted on the walls, and one of the film’s dramatic highpoints sees the characters desperately trying to duct tape paper over the letters. It’s glorious. Also appearing are a young woman’s upper body (she’s wearing a bra to prove this isn’t actually an Italian film from the 80s) being used as a ouija board, an idea to which the other characters react with shrugs of “why not?”, a moebius strip road, Dee Wallace’s possessed face, and…the black guy surviving(!). It’s absurd, it’s certainly not thought through with even a bit of real world logic in mind, but damn, is Ouija House’s second half entertaining, if you like your ideas strange, and their presentation straight-faced.

In short: Octane (2003)

Senga Wilson (Madeleine Stowe) is driving her daughter Nat (Mischa Barton) home from a stint with Nat’s father/Senga’s ex-husband. The two have quite the night drive in front of them, a situation that isn’t made any more pleasant by the fact that Nat and Senga are in perpetual battle - this evening’s casus belli being Senga forbidding Nat going to some sort of music festival with her friends - nor by Senga running on no sleep and a lot of psychopharmacology.

After a heavy row, Nat steals away with a teenage hitchhiker she just met an hour or so ago and her said hitchhiker’s freakish friends . Unfortunately, these guys belong to some sort of highway cult led by a man calling himself The Father (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, rather unfatherly). They’re into brainwashing, dressing up as cops, ambulance drivers or truckers, causing car accidents as well as staging fake accidents. In a thematic curve ball, they are also heavily involved in bloodletting but cults all too often ignore the aesthetic pleasures of a coherent field of symbols.

After first being tricked by a fake cop who is part of the cult – not that the actual cops will turn out to be any help - Senga takes up the pursuit of the cult herself, a project that is made somewhat more difficult by her tendency to hallucinate a peculiar motivational speaker (Martin McDougall).

All the while, a man in a recovery van (Norman Reedus) is watching everyone involved, loitering sinisterly.

Marcus Adams’s Octane (working from a script by the great Stephen Volk) is a somewhat peculiar film that attempts to enrich a basic thriller plot with plenty of weirdness as well as a thematic emphasis on the strangeness that seems to be common when driving through the US by night. At least if you follow this British movie shot in Luxembourg.

Often, the film’s basic strangeness and willingness to aim for the dream-like instead of the gritty is quite a strength, providing it with a mood very much its own, and perhaps even a degree of actual thoughts underpinning it. From time to time, though, Octane drifts off into what feels like needless obscurity; at a few other times (particularly when it comes to Nat’s silly adventures in the cult’s brainwashing truck) its surrealism is rather on the silly side, with an adorably conservative idea of sex and drugs.

This is certainly no film if you want a straightforward thriller with a logical plot. When it works, it’s all strange ideas and waking dream-like direction and stuff that somewhat makes sense on a metaphorical or thematic level, and not so much on the field of narrative logic. Which is often the kind of thriller I prefer, so I found myself rather taken with Octane, not despite but because its plot logic breaks down repeatedly, if it ever existed at all.