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.