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: Nocturne (2016)

Obviously running away from something or someone she’d rather not face this night, Jo (Clare Niederpruem) goes to a small graduation party of people she isn’t exactly friends with (as played by Hailey Nebeker, Melanie Stone, Darien Willardson, Colton Tran, and Jake Stormoen). There are various strains of dysfunction among and between these people - suggestions of rather typical young adult problems from eating disorders to jealousy and general prickishness abound. But instead of just getting drunk, or stoned, and sleeping with the wrong people for the wrong reasons, our protagonists decide to pretend they’ve never seen a horror movie and hold a séance. Of course, what starts out as a game becomes rather disturbing when the entity they are talking to demonstrates a bit too much detailed knowledge of everyone’s darker secrets as well as a nasty streak. The thing frightens them so much, they do the big no-no in movie séances (as well as in polite society) and break it off without saying goodbye to the entity.

During the course of the night, everyone’s problems and secret sins come to the surface; people begin acting only on their worst impulses in ways that can only lead to pain for everyone involved. But that’s before the really bad stuff begins to happen, from the old standby of demonic possession to various pretty horrible deaths.

I didn’t go into Stephen Shimek’s indie horror Nocturne expecting much of it at all. There are, after all, countless films about séances gone wrong right now, most of them not worth the time watching them, and adding US style demons like they are  en vogue right now to the mix usually makes a film even less interesting. After all, how often can you watch some possessed girl float in the corner of some ceiling while sprouting bad theology before you become bored by it? I have certainly reached that point of saturation a year or two ago.

However, Nocturne is rather more interesting than the set-up or the demons suggest. It starts with a group of characters that seem much more convincing young adults than typical for this sort of production, with problems that ring truer than usual and whose escalation through the supernatural is effectively horrifying because it cuts to what feels like actual bone. For once, the more psychological aspects of the demonic activity here seem actually insidious because it’s not going through the demonic playbook but actually preying on the weaknesses of the characters. Weaknesses the script and some more than decent performances by the group of young actors have prepared well.

Once things turn physical, Shimek shows a fine macabre imagination that keeps the connections between the demise of the characters and their weaknesses open without going too far in the direction of ironic deaths. These deaths, the audience is supposed to feel, so ironic distance would be fatal for the film’s effect.


Speaking of effects, the film’s practical effects are more than decent too, never becoming the sole point of the film yet also keeping the proper unflinching pose. As an added bonus for friends of the Weird like me, Nocturne also features some rather cool parts where it plays with the nature of space and time, as well as that most rare of things – a twist ending that is actually an organic part of the film that came before.