The conceit of Nadia Conners’ The Uninvited brings to mind plays by the likes of Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter: a wealthy Los Angeles couple prepare to throw a garden party, but their plans are disrupted when an elderly woman neither of them knows arrives at their house and claims that she lives there. The film, also written by Conners, was indeed originally intended to be a play, and its theatrical origins show in its single setting and monologue-heavy screenplay. Unfortunately, The Uninvited holds none of the tension or intrigue of a great play, instead acting as an example of why many dismiss films that formally mimic theatre. With its stilted dialogue, flat visual style, and rambling yet oddly uneventful narrative, the film gives its audience nothing to latch onto.
The couple at the center of The Uninvited are Sammy (Walton Goggins, who is married to Conners) and Rose (Elizabeth Reaser), respectively, an agent and a former actress. Sammy is at a crossroads in his career — though he conceals this from Rose for much of the film — and Rose struggles to reconcile her current life as a wife and mother with her former success on stage. The arrival of Helen (Lois Smith), whose memory is clearly diminished and who Rose learns has no close relatives, initially keeps Rose away from the party, as she has decided to take care of Helen while she waits for a friend across town to pick her up. Another twist in Rose’s night arises in the form of Lucien (Pedro Pascal), a movie star who Sammy has unexpectedly invited in the hopes of snagging as a client — and who is also Rose’s ex-boyfriend, who still carries a torch for her.
The two main narrative threads in the film are Rose’s reunion with Lucien, which sparks complicated feelings about her past and makes her re-assess whether she is satisfied with her current position in life, and Sammy’s efforts to cobble together a new client list at this party, having broken off from the agency he worked at under contentious circumstances. The stakes for both characters are not clear at the film’s outset; instead, Conners reveals them slowly from revelations and disclosures made in long conversations they have with one another and their guests. These scenes, laden with monologues explaining backstory, suppressed feelings, and themes with unsubtle emphasis, tend to stretch on, and the actors seem to struggle to find a natural rhythm for their dialogue. As a result, the film’s pace is often turgid, and due to the toggling back and forth between different conflicts among different character pairings, Conners never builds the narrative tension needed to invest in Rose and Sammy as characters.
Though Helen’s arrival is the film’s inciting incident and seems initially to be the main source of conflict, she soon fades into the background of Rose and Sammy’s marital and professional strife, with her advanced age acting as a thematic counterweight to the midlife dramas playing out around her. The venerable Smith gives a complex, vivid performance, suggesting the long and rich life her character has lived through subtle reactions and precise handling of dialogue. Yet Conners never effectively integrates Helen into the story; it’s telling that the plot would be virtually unaffected if Helen had not shown up at Rose and Sammy’s house at all. And elsewhere, the film’s aesthetic could best be described as quiet luxury — which is appropriate for the upscale lifestyle of its characters — but the array of beige and cream tones in costuming and décor is dull to look at. The compositions, too, are functional but never dynamic, consisting mostly of unobtrusive angles and actors arranged in predictable ways. This prevailing bland aesthetic only functions to further dampen a film that, narratively speaking, never manages to get off the ground. While Conners imbues The Uninvited with potentially interesting ideas about aging, motherhood, and the difficulties of facing midlife for women working in a youth-obsessed industry, she ultimately fails to integrate them into a compelling or cohesive narrative, which leaves far too little to chew on for a film so influenced by mid-century theatrical drama.
DIRECTOR: Nadia Conners; CAST: Elisabeth Reaser, Walton Goggins, Pedro Pascal, Lois Smith, Rufus Sewell; DISTRIBUTOR: Foton Distribution; IN THEATERS: April 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
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