Welcome back to Double Feature, the MovieJawn column where we recommend two movies that share a common element!

by Kevin Murphy, Staff Writer

As someone with social anxiety, I hate a good dinner party. Trusting other people to make food and manage the gathering? Hard pass. And I feel justified in that conviction and my paranoia thanks to several movies demonstrating the secrets that these hosts can keep, because I am also a sucker for confirmation bias.

Everyone has skeletons in their closets; there’s plenty of works that explore this around a small gathering, like The Humans (dir. Stephen Karam, 2021) showing the fractures in a family during Thanksgiving, but it’s something altogether different when those secrets are more sinister, and the skeletons more literal. Two films in particular make for a strong double feature for this: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), and Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation (2015), with hosts throwing different kinds of killer parties to make for two different kinds of thriller.

(Please note that after these brief synopses I will be discussing full plot details, and the reveals are best experienced within the films, not with this analysis. Reader beware if you haven’t seen them! Go watch them! They’re both excellent!)

In Rope, Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger) kill one of their former schoolmates, tucking his body into a chest in their living room shortly before throwing a dinner party to which they have invited the victim’s parents, fiancee, and old friend, as well as their headmaster from boarding school, Rupert (James Stewart). For about 75 minutes, the tension between the guests mounts and the threat of discovery becomes increasingly real, which Brandon finds amusing, and which sends Philip into a spiral of anxiety.

The Invitation sees Will (Logan Marshall Green) attending a dinner party held by his ex-wife, Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband David (Michiel Huisman), who have also invited a number of mutual friends. The painful history here runs deeper than a broken relationship, with many of these friends having been present during a traumatic incident that led to Will and Eden’s separation, and awkwardness likewise runs deeper than that due in no small part to a refusal to acknowledge this loss. It was always going to be a nightmare, and Will’s paranoia does little to help matters as things get weirder, bit by bit, and his concerns are dismissed by everyone in attendance despite the rising tension.

These two movies don’t tell the same story by any stretch–even their structures are different, with Rope showing the body in the second shot and The Invitation leaving a sheet over its sinister intentions until it’s ready to uncover them, a stark contrast between the audience knowing and suspecting what the guests are unaware of thanks to the different perspectives. The former is tense but mostly peaceful, its incidents isolated; the latter explodes into violence in its final stretch and shows that an entire community has enacted their own massacres on that same Los Angeles hillside.

Despite these structural differences, the shared themes should be evident, and the similarities between the films go deeper than just being dinner parties where the hosts have nefarious ideas for the evening. Everyone’s got secrets, and many are kept solely due to social courtesy. In The Invitation, it would be rude to leave the party early when the hosts are planning on breaking out expensive wine for dear old friends, and so most hints that something’s wrong get ignored. Rope has Brandon smoothing over concerns about their seemingly-absent guest, as well as the odd behavior of himself and Philip, and because of his charm most of that is swallowed as readily as the champagne that he keeps pouring for everyone.

And the boundaries of social norms do get pushed because of the tangled relationships that guests have with each other and the behaviors shown. Brandon has decided that he’s going to try and reignite the flame between David’s fiancee and old friend, who have been separated for some time, and his manipulations are called out for what they are by the two he’s trying to maneuver, albeit quietly, for the most part. The guests at the party in The Invitation are visibly uncomfortable with a number of things happening–guests who aren’t from their social circle, watching a video of one of David and Eden’s other cult members dying while surrounded by friends, and hearing Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch) recount with a flat tone of voice how he accidentally killed his own wife–but only one of them considers this too much to accept and attempts to leave, because they’re all so entwined with each other thanks to their shared history.

Despite those tangles, things unravel as a result of impolite candor, with one specific guest openly expressing their suspicions. Rupert, who has been dancing around the big questions all evening, waits until after everyone else leaves to approach the young men, pressing them about what they’ve done until Brandon reveals their “perfect murder” with a sense of pride. Will’s constant questioning of Eden and David’s behavior continues to build, until he finds the farewell message from their cult guru and his suspicions are confirmed, which leads to his wine-spilling outburst at the film’s climax, the other guests realizing that he’s been right all along, and the bloody fallout of the whole situation. They all would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling guests unwilling to let suspicious things slide out of politeness.

There’s also parallels with motivation, and how the hosts are convinced that they have the right to kill. Using people's grief as a lever to convince them of a worldview that absolves them of guilt is one of the ways that cults are able to gain traction even among people who are otherwise reasonable, and this behavior gets dismissed as harmlessly strange, which enables it. This is not too far removed from how Brandon and Philip use Rupert’s thought experiment from their school days–which he goes over briefly with the victim’s father and aunt–to convince them that their intelligence absolves them of any guilt for their actions. They believe themselves to be superior specimens, and their victim to be inferior, and therefore what they’ve done isn’t immoral at all and should be permitted. It’s not until Rupert himself expresses his shock and dismay that his point of philosophical discussion was taken seriously enough to be acted upon that he realizes what his rhetoric has led to, which sets this apart from The Invitation where death is the intended outcome of the indoctrination.

Ultimately, these two films strike at a similar question: how can one believe themselves justified in murdering a guest? One pair comes to this through philosophy and logic, the other through emotion and manipulation; they consider themselves more enlightened and better able to control the fates of others, their lives, their relationships, and their deaths. They’re too focused on resolving their own grief or proving their own point to understand the pain they’re causing. Of the two films, Rope does a better job of answering this question by shredding the philosophy at play, and the very idea of being entitled to kill others. The Invitation shows its rejection through a sense of horror, focused on the pain caused to those who are killed and implying with its final moments how many others suffer the same violent fate, but I prefer the verbal evisceration delivered by Jimmy Stewart for lasting impact because it cuts straight to the why.

I’m not so cynical as to believe that this is a common aspect of people. Rupert outright states that there’s something in Brandon that let him commit this act, and that it’s not a mark of superiority even if it’s something that sets him apart from most of the rest of society, and I agree with that. In truth, it’s not these extreme scenarios that have me concerned and asocial, but they certainly make for the most fun “well what if” explanations for why I’m passing on a visit to my high school classmate’s small gathering.

But citing them is certainly more polite than asking why they didn't learn to wash their hands until March 2020 and lost that knowledge within six months.

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