Skip to main content

Who Invited Them review: mind games, murder, and mayhem

Regardless of how much they might suggest otherwise, no one wants to be seen as uncool. Who Invited Them, the new horror comedy from writer-director Duncan Birmingham, understands that. To its credit, the film also understands that a person’s desire to be accepted and welcomed by those they admire can, in certain instances, lead them to ignore their own instincts and perform acts that they wouldn’t normally consider doing.

Consequently, while Who Invited Them never quite reaches the heights it would need to in order to be considered one of this year’s genre gems, it does manage to steal a trick from every great horror movie’s playbook. The film, which premieres exclusively on Shudder this week, weaponizes its characters’ core desires and forces them into a situation that only grows weirder and more distressing the further into its runtime Who Invited Them gets.

In doing so, the film delivers more than its fair share of the kind of “don’t go in there!” moments that the horror genre has become known for over the years. But unlike a lot of mainstream horror movies, Who Invited Them knows that audiences will accept it when a character, say, walks willingly into an obviously dangerous room so long as they understand what drives them to do so.

Brooke points a knife at Margo in Who Invited Them.
Shudder, 2022

In the case of Who Invited Them, it’s the yearning Adam (Ryan Hansen) feels to be seen as a legitimate member of the Hollywood Hills elite that leads him and his wife, Margo (Melissa Tang), to so easily welcome a pair of total strangers into their home. After introducing themselves as Margo and Adam’s new next-door neighbors, the strangers in question, Tom (Timothy Granaderos) and Sasha (Perry Mattfeld), talk Hansen and Tang’s unsuspecting newcomers into hosting a late-night hang-out session full of alcohol, music, and psychological manipulation.

Building from there, Who Invited Them quickly evolves into a fun, charmingly low-budget spin on the kind of home invasion thrillers that horror fans have become very familiar with over the years. Birmingham’s script helps it become that by making it immediately clear that Tom and Sasha’s reasons for showing up at Adam and Margo’s house aren’t as innocent as they claim. The director does so without also prematurely giving away the purpose of the couple’s visit, which allows Who Invited Them to keep viewers on their back foot for most of the film’s story.

That’s one of Who Invited Them‘s more impressive achievements, but also a necessary one. If Tom and Sasha’s actual intentions were revealed too early, most of the suspense would be removed from their prolonged invasion of Adam and Margo’s lives. Although the film’s climactic revelations about Tom and Sasha are fairly predictable as well, Birmingham does a good job of making viewers feel Adam and Margo’s growing confusion, which prevents the intensity of the conflict between Who Invited Them‘s four leads from ever deflating.

Sasha, Adam, Margo, and Tom stand grouped together in Who Invited Them.
Shudder, 2022

It’s in the film’s opening sequence, which follows Adam and Margo’s young son as a late-night search for his parents gradually turns into a nightmare, that Who Invited Them also feels the most like a straightforward horror story. These first few minutes inject the film with a sense of horror and tension that Birmingham manages to sustain for most of its 80-minute runtime. In fact, as far as prologues go, Who Invited Them’s unnerving first scene might rank as one of the best cold opens of any of this year’s horror films.

Who Invited Them does, of course, move away quite a bit from the dark tone of its opening sequence by quickly adding shades of comedy and absurdity to its story. The performances given by the film’s four leads, in turn, reflect the duality of Who Invited Them’s tone. For their parts, Hansen and Granaderos constantly ham it up in front of the camera as the film’s two primary male figures, turning in performances that feel perfectly suited for Who Invited Them’s funnier moments.

Opposite them, Mattfeld and Tang turn in similarly heightened but more emotionally layered performances as Sasha and Margo. Out of the film’s four leads, Mattfeld, in particular, seems to be the most suited for Who Invited Them’s darkly funny tone. Her tongue-in-cheek, self-aware performance as Sasha is at the center of many of the film’s best scenes, including one private interaction between her and Tang that effectively combines, of all things, a set of golf clubs and a drunken phone call to one of Margo’s former band members.

Sasha, Tom, Adam, and Margo sit around a table together in Who Invited Them.
Shudder, 2022

The performances given by Mattfeld and Co. help root Who Invited Them in one consistent, humorously dark tonal space. That’s especially true in the moments when Birmingham’s script bends over backward to try to maintain the film’s underlying tension by leaving the confines of Margo and Adam’s home in order to follow one of their friends, Teeny (Tipper Newton), on a superfluous search through the darkened streets of the Hollywood Hills.

The fact that Birmingham feels the need to even include a largely inconsequential subplot about one of Adam and Margo’s friends is, unfortunately, emblematic of the slightness of Who Invited Them’s story. The film is ultimately a minor horror effort, one that makes great use of its lead’s all-too-relatable desire for validation but never quite reaches its full potential.

Who Invited Them - Official Red Band Trailer [HD] | A Shudder Original

For that reason, Who Invited Them makes a lot of sense as Shudder’s latest straight-to-streaming exclusive. It’s a fun little thriller that should manage to satisfy all the horror fans out there who might find themselves in the mood for something that’s easy to digest this weekend, but it’s not powerful or effective enough to leave a truly lasting impression.

Who Invited Them premieres Thursday, September 1 on Shudder.

Editors' Recommendations

Alex Welch
Alex Welch is a TV and movies writer based out of Los Angeles. In addition to Digital Trends, his work has been published by…
Where the Crawdads Sing review: a bland murder mystery
Kya Clark sits against a tree in Where the Crawdads Sing.

For a film that takes such great pains to immerse viewers in the environment of one specific corner of the United States, Where the Crawdads Sing is shockingly bland. Adapted from Delia Owens’ best-selling 2018 novel, the new film explores the life of a young woman who is forced to raise herself in a marsh in North Carolina. The film, which takes place throughout the 1950s and 1960s, spends a considerable amount of time discussing and showcasing the murky wetland that emerges as its protagonist’s unlikely home.

However, Where the Crawdads Sing never truly takes advantage of its backwoods setting. Even when a shocking murder in the film’s central marsh threatens to turn the life of its young heroine upside down, Where the Crawdads Sing remains surprisingly unimaginative, and its refusal to commit to the darker gothic elements of its story renders the film lifeless. Consequently, what could have been a moody and immersive murder mystery instead ends up feeling more like a safe cross between a late-era Nicholas Sparks adaptation and an uninspired, psychologically thin character study.
A suspicious death

Read more
The Black Phone review: A spooky, surface-level thriller
A ghost stands next to Finney in The Black Phone.

The Black Phone is at its best when it's working with as little as possible. A majority of the new film from Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson takes place in a grimy basement, but it manages to make the most out of its central confined space — filling it with intimidating shadows and secrets for its protagonist to discover over the course of The Black Phone’s 102-minute runtime. Based on a short story of the same name by Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill, the film follows a young boy who gets kidnapped by a notorious child killer and has only a few days to escape before he becomes the man’s next victim.

The film’s premise supplies it with an easy-to-grasp conflict and enough tension to sustain a feature-length story, and when The Black Phone actually focuses on its young protagonist’s efforts to escape from the soundproofed basement he’s found himself trapped in, it works as a visceral, occasionally spooky horror-thriller. It’s when The Black Phone attempts to bend its thriller plot to be compatible with certain themes about abuse and self-esteem, however, that the film comes up disappointingly short.
Calls from the other side

Read more
Fire Island review: A fun but basic summer rom-com
Erin, Keegan, Howie, Noah, and Luke stand together in Fire Island.

There are moments of inspired whimsy and comedy in Fire Island, the new queer rom-com from director Andrew Ahn and writer/star Joel Kim Booster. The film is based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but offers a hyper-modern take on the classic story of love, class, and learning to look past our surface selves. The movie follows many of the same plot beats as its source material — often to its detriment — but nonetheless adapts Austen’s story to fit a setting, time period, and ensemble of characters that exist under very different circumstances than those featured in the original text.

To Fire Island’s credit, the film doesn’t hide its Austen inspirations. The film’s opening scene sees Booster’s Noah, a hedonistic playboy, recite a quote from the Pride and Prejudice author only to quickly subvert any expectations Austen’s fans might have by having Noah quickly disregard the novelist’s assertion about men and women as nothing more than heteronormative foolishness. It’s a moment that is intentionally subversive to the point of being almost grating. However, it also injects Fire Island with a dose of playful irreverence that is, unfortunately, absent from most of the film.
An annual retreat

Read more