Wait, Is This Party a Cult?

The Invitation is one of the most bone-chilling films I’ve ever seen, both for what it is in itself and for the mirror it eerily holds up to my experience. But what has surprised me, after living with it for the last eight years, is its uncanny refraction of the work of Jesus Christ.

The film’s long-haired and bearded protagonist (Will) is invited by his ex-wife (Eden) to a dinner party she’s hosting with her new husband (David), along with several of Will’s old friends. As Will and his girlfriend, Kira, approach the party, the audience’s sympathetic impulse to escape is immediate and colossal. It’s so manifestly a terrible idea. We know the gathering will be unbearably awkward, but we aren’t prepared for the ghastly night that awaits him and the other guests.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is in how it ratchets up the nebulous dread that builds throughout most of its runtime until it hypertrophies and bursts in its climax. But it does so by having the other guests maintain the party’s strange status quo by reproving Will for his steadily growing misgivings. Will senses something isn’t right, that something is terribly wrong here, but it’s more an intuitive grasping of an undisclosed whole than it is an exhibit of empirical evidence guiding him in this. 

We, the audience, suspects he’s right, but we aren’t provided an omniscient view that sees more than Will does. Will is the aperture through which we witness the unfolding drama. His perspective is the hermeneutical key to the whole that gathers together and makes sense of the incoherent mass of parts. And yet as he haltingly pieces things together and complains that the answers he’s getting are insufficient, we feel uncomfortable with how he’s introducing noise into the tonality of the gathering. Will’s qualms are pebbles breaking up the evening’s placid surface, and it’s hard for us to tolerate that.

Will’s misgivings grow beyond the obvious discomfort of reconnecting with a former spouse: more and bigger indicators of something — we know not what — continue to arrive and provoke him to speak up. But still we want him to quiet down and not disrupt the party. Come on, Will. Everyone’s having a good time. Do you have to cause a scene? The viewer becomes an accomplice to whatever’s happening exactly to the extent that we long for Will to keep his cool and just drop it.

The Invitation premiered ten years ago in April 2015 as I was gearing up for an unfortunate trip of my own. Though the film is superb in its own right, it’s also the hand-around-my-throat-feeling parallels between its story and my own that elicits so many shudders from me. 

I came to a school that I don’t need to name here the summer of that same year, humming with nervous energy, excited for the possibilities whispering from around the corner of a completed degree program. But I was also increasingly hesitant, as I had become disenchanted with some of the school’s distinctives.

But I went anyway. My family and I packed up all our belongings and relocated, and I tried my best to suppress the disquiet gripping my innards.

You might think, “So you disagreed with the school’s position on some things. What was so hard about that?” But it wasn’t just mere disagreement. The things I found myself so exasperated over were dark things disguised as light, meant to both crush opponents and frighten those who weren’t so zealous into getting in line. I was advised time and time again not to be so upset, to be more reasonable, and not get so worked up about this or that matter. But, undoubtedly through deficiencies of my own as well as the pressures of my location, I couldn’t. 

What I remember feeling throughout this time was utterly, crushingly alone. Alone in my grievances and objections and choking on the fumes of a law-preoccupied ideology, I felt beaten to a pulp by the mistrust that had engendered against me. It seemed I was the only one who noticed things were awry, left to feel like I was actually the problem. I was by no means innocent through all of this, but even a flawed witness can tell the truth. 

In The Invitation, Will is repeatedly told that everything’s fine. Perhaps Will is the problem? Even so, Will can’t shake his suspicions. He finally reaches a point at which he can no longer keep up any pretense of things being normal. He calls attention to the group’s missing friend, Choi, who has somehow been detained from the gathering for hours. Doing what, exactly? In a rare moment of cell phone reception, he hears a voicemail from Choi saying that he arrived at the house hours ago. 

“Where’s Choi?” Will asks Eden and David, seemingly amused at first. But he repeats himself. “Where the f— is Choi?” Again he’s told to lower his voice, to calm down, but this time he refuses. “Why is everyone acting so f—ing polite? Something isn’t right here … There is something very strange going on here and no one is saying anything,” he asserts. He won’t have it any longer: no more euphemisms or circumlocutions or ignoring the elephant at the dining table. He names the thing: Eden, David, and David’s friend Pruitt have joined a cult. He cuts off an objection from one of his friends that everyone has the right to their own beliefs. “No! It’s not about communion, it’s not about family, it’s about denial,” Will diagnoses.

Will and everyone else had already seen a video David shared earlier, documenting the death of a member of The Invitation. While that unsettled everyone, most of them also shrugged it off and listened to David and Eden’s rationalization of it as beautiful. But it isn’t beautiful. It’s about pretending that death is something that can be managed if we call it good. That we should make friends with death. That we should slough off our discontent with the way things are through an escape from the world. The Invitation says it’s about healing from anguish, but in reality, it’s about succumbing to it. 

Both Will and Eden are reeling from the death of their son two years prior. Eden is trying to escape the weight of her grief, but Will hasn’t yet been able to fully assimilate this tragedy. Death means something because their son means something. But not the way the peddlers of false hope construe it. Death is an enemy to be overcome, and it is inevitable. It isn’t our friend. And nothing makes it easy or turns it into an anesthetic for the world’s hurts. To be a creature is to hurt. We hurt because people mean something to us. To shut that off is to surrender our humanity.

And so finally the purpose of this gathering is unveiled. Or rather, its husk is broken open, and David, Eden, and Pruitt’s latent intent is unleashed. They have concealed the murderous facet of the invitation to their guests, but, bizarrely, the niceties and evangelistic overtures thus far haven’t been false. That death-oriented kernel has been waiting to take root in time, in their bodies and in those of their guests, as they believe it is the entryway into peace. They believe they are doing their guests a favor because The Invitation is a cult that enshrines death as the greatest gift in this world.

The party erupts into panicked confusion as one of them is found dead, poisoned. David and his accomplice, Pruitt, begin to chase down and execute the remaining guests. What was veiled casts off its pretenses.

The film ends with Will and his girlfriend, Kira, having survived David’s and Pruitt’s plan. They look across the valley and see dozens of red lanterns hanging in yards, just like the one David hung earlier. A helicopter races overhead to the chaos erupting citywide as members of The Invitation carry out their ministries of “mercy.” The shock of the evening’s revelation gives way to fathomless horror as the scope of their plan becomes apparent, as does the despair and myopia that consumed every one of them to make such a plan seem good and right.

The gospel turns the world’s values on their heads, but it doesn’t overturn what is good and true and beautiful itself. One doesn’t need a sophisticated epistemology to know that suffering is bad or that the squashing of grief and its repackaging into marks of blessedness is anti-human and anti-God. You only need to know that in the beginning God made what is and said that being was good. There is a way that seemeth right unto the desperate and despairing, but the end thereof are the ways of death.

The status quo has to be unsettled, or a lot of people are going to die. But make no mistake: you are not Will. None of us are. The horrible thing about watching The Invitation is that all of us, in our vanity, imagine ourselves occupying his role. But reader, you are not. I am not. You and I are the other partygoers, embarrassedly begging Will to stop making a scene, to sit down and listen to David. 

Jesus is the only one who ignores the disapproving faces shocked by his indelicacy. When things don’t add up and the world’s answers don’t make any sense, Jesus is the one who asks, “Where’s Choi?” and knocks the poison-laced wine from our lips. He knows that death can neither be pasteurized nor offer the solace we need: it is the end of possibilities, the enemy of the Lord of life and the creatures he loves.

Jesus didn’t need to piece anything together to learn the true character or intentions of the world system: “He needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man” (Jn 2:25). But he came to the party anyway, to reveal what the world was really about and to show us how we are allied with it, however much we protest we are not, however much we assert we know what’s going on and that our motives and aims are different. Jesus shows we are all latched together, deceived by and targeted for death.

Death invited us all to a party we all gleefully attend. It promised freedom from anguish, cruel counterfeits of the real thing. But Another arrived at the party, uninvited, but freely chosen. Like Will, Jesus is calling the bluffs of our party’s hosts and urging all of us to leave now; to not fret over decorum or the hosts’ feelings, but to heed his warnings and get out. He implores us all to flee and sneaks us out the back. But unlike Will, Jesus didn’t seek escape for himself. He did not flee, but he stayed to endure all that the Davids and Pruitts of the world planned for us so we could go free.