Short Film: Invite Only

Released in 2019, this film by Joe Leone runs to 27 minutes and has a dichotomy at its heart that perhaps was best avoided.

The film starts with Lucille (Kate Brandenburg) in a hotel room, reading. There is a knock at the door and she looks through the spyhole to catch a view of another woman, Rowan (Remiara Eve). Lucille opens the door.

Rowan explains that she works for the hotel and is checking if there is anything that Lucille needs, but Lucille doesn’t want anything. She then suggests that the window sticks and Lucille admits that it is stuck open. Rowan offers to fix it and asks to be invited in… which she is.

Kate Brandenburg as Lucille

Once in the room, she unsticks the window and then admits to Lucille that she finds her striking and moves to kiss her. This leads to a tryst on the bed during which the vampire (as I’m sure you realised) bites the girl. Cut to the morning and Lucille awakens, she gets out of bed, tells Rowan that the night before really changed her, jerks the curtain open, indicating she knows what Rowan is and wants to destroy her, and then dives under the bed to save herself.

Remiara Eve as Rowan

As night falls, Lucille gets out from under the bed and with her being alone in the room, this at first seems to be a 'new vampire coping on her own' film – and struggling with the hunger, it seems. This drives her to contemplate suicide but Rowan approaches and suggests jumping into a river is not the way to do it. Nor is sunlight apparently. She offers to teach Lucille a better way and admits she has been watching her for some time.

bloodied mouth

So the interesting aspect about this was suggesting that vampires are natural – a part of the planetary eco-system that can cull the worst parts of humanity. This is all well and good but it is also the start of the dichotomy I mentioned. We discover that the one way to kill a vampire is to melt the body in holy water and cut the head off. To me they should have stuck with beheading. The melting with holy water is, of course, supernatural (rather than natural) but more so it suggests a morality that is lacking in the vampires, a diabolic origin that sits ill with the idea that they are also a natural part of the eco-system.

Be that as it may, this does suffer a tad from overly stagy dialogue and delivery but gets away with that for the most part. The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK