Metacritic reviews

The Invitation is supremely well-crafted.

A charged, unnerving turn of the screw, The Invitation is consumed by the fear of forgetting.

The buildup stretches longer than it should, but the payoff comes with a satisfying bang.

While some viewers may complain that the action is too heavily weighted toward the ending, I’d argue that this is a strong example of destination-not-the-journey film-making.

This well-acted, beautifully modulated exercise represents director Karyn Kusama’s strongest work in years, revealing an assurance of tone, craft and purpose that haven’t been in evidence since her Sundance prize-winning debut, “Girlfight.”

A taut thriller that almost doesn't waste a single step.

The Invitation maintains a unique intrigue that constantly defies expectations.

It's a welcome human-scale outing for a director who stumbled upon leaping from 2000's breakout debut Girlfight to the would-be tentpole dud Aeon Flux.

There are a number of things that work in The Invitation: The cast is uniformly great (Tom Hardy – er, I mean Marshall-Green – is a standout, Lynch basically has a monopoly on the creep factor at this point in his career), and the film is elegantly shot.

As the tension effectively builds and pay-off is pulled off with aplomb, The Invitation is a mostly effective small-scale thriller, despite some missteps along the way.