Slap the words “unsolved crime podcast” and any hoary old “gather all the suspects” whodunit is “fresh” and new? Is that the idea behind “A Deadly Invitation,” titled “Invitación a un Asesinato”(Invitation to an Assasination/Murder) when it was released in Mexico?
This laughably arch and obvious murder mystery is tedium itself, a tale with little wit, no sense of menace, no urgency and little to no mystery about it.
It’s bad, and thanks to an anticlimax or two, the badness just won’t end.
Agatha (Regina Blandón) is a successful podcaster from the big city, summoned to meet her money-marrying estranged sister Olivia (Maribel Verdú) at her clifftop seaside mansion.
Villa Elisa was named for Olivia’s adopted child, who died five years ago. Since then, she’s lost contact with her sister and divorced her latest rich husband (Pedro Damián), but not before making him buy her a yacht. And she’s invited her almost-estranged sister, her ex Carlos, old friend Sonia (Stephanie Cayo), Sonia’s hunky yoga instructor/lover (Aarón Díaz), a young doctor (José María de Tavira) and an actor friend (Manolo Cardona) to a mysterious gathering.
Olivia hints at old grudges and fresh grievances, at motives and messy history in giving her “Why I brought you all here” (in Spanish, or dubbed) speech. There’s a hint of a threat in her suggestion this gathering will be one of discovery.
“You should figure out who should should apologize to, and who you should say goodbye to,” she advises.
We know, the moment we meet her, that golddigging Olivia won’t last the night. When the cops are called about her “murder, accident or suicide,” there’s bickering over jurisdiction and a local cell service outage that forces the captain to go back to the office.
That leaves impressionable Lt. Julian (Juan Pablo de Santiago) in charge, all by himself. As he’s a fanboy, he enlists podcaster Agatha to solve this mystery, to help interrogate one and all, to literally sniff around when and find secret passages and secret motives and old rivalries and blood grudges that might drive one or more of the “suspects,” who include not just guests but staff.
The script is so half-assed that the cell service issue is abandoned to expedite Agatha’s mystery-solving. Her producer (Mariana Cabrera) is so helpful, sent details to nail down back in the city, she should crack the case herself.
Gadgets and secret associations described in flashback don’t do a damned thing to throw the viewer off our initial thoughts about the death, and who exactly benefits from it and might have further motives to harm others.
This isn’t a “They die, one by one” thriller, which would have raised the laughably low stakes. There’s no suspense. The clues aren’t much of anything even a sharp-eyed viewer would pick up on, because most of them are off-camera complications.
The script, based on a Carmen Posadas novel, doesn’t play fair and doesn’t play smart. The light touches land like rotten tomatillos.
“Knives Out” revived this genre with wit and panache, and Kenneth Branagh reminded us of the many dated pleasures in the works of Dame Agatha, even when the mystery isn’t as mysterious as you might like.
“A Deadly Invitation” is as dumb and dull and creaky as the drawing room mysteries of old, a film that started life with little promise and never fails to live down to that.
Rating: TV-14, violence, adult situations, profanity
Cast: Regina Blandón, Pedro Damián, Aarón Díaz, Stephanie Cayo, Manolo Cardona, José María de Tavira, Helena Rojo, Juan Pablo de Santiago, Mariana Cabrera, Juan Manuel Pernas and Maribel Verdú
Credits: Directed by J.M Cravioto, scripted by Javier Durán Pérez and Anton Goenechea, based on a novel by Carmen Posadas. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:33
