The Uninvited (15) |Close-Up Film Review

The film is inspired by a real life incident in writer/director Nadia Connors’ life, when an unknown elderly woman turned up at her Hollywood home, claiming it was where she lived, just as Connors and her husband Walton Goggins, who co-stars in the movie, were preparing to host a smart cocktail party. 

So in the film actress Rose (Elizabeth Reaser) and her talent agent husband Sammy (Goggins) are preparing to host that cocktail party.   Rose is fussing over what to wear – she changes her outfit a lot in the course of the film.  The couple have a child and Rose has largely put her career on the back burner to be a wife and mother. 

When they find an elderly stranger, Helen (Lois Smith) sitting in her car outside their posh Hollywood home and futilely clicking her clicker, which refuses to open the car port, Rose feels compelled to let her in.  Helen insists that this is her home.  They make futile efforts to find out who Helen is and return her to whatever care facility she has come from.  But as she sits there in the centre of their home, Helen’s presence and her emerging story cause Rose to examine her own life and the choices she has made.   And meanwhile the guests have arrived and the party is going on in the background. 

Despite some impressive photography and the fluid design of the couple’s lush Hollywood home, the script does rather give away the fact that the project started out as a play.  It is very dialogue heavy. It boils down to a lot of  overprivileged Hollywood types talking about themselves, taking cocaine and having their “spirit photos” taken by some quack photographer. While well performed, the characters are, initially at least, all rather shallow, silly and self obsessed.

The exception however is Lois Smith as Helen.  94 years old and still magnetic on screen.   She is wonderful.  Rose’s concern for Helen is the one aspect of her character, which makes her own personal preoccupations a little more sympathetic and prevent her from coming over simply as an overprivileged bore.  The way Helen’s story emerges largely though not exclusively through  the interaction of two women forms the spine of the piece. 

The male characters however don’t really engage as powerfully.  Goggins as Sammy has some effective moments of tension with his wife – the marriage is obviously teetering somewhat –  and with his star client Gerald (Rufus Sewell), though one of his most memorable scenes is a comic one, when he has to climb in through the toilet window, where Helen has got herself locked in.   Eva De Dominici as Gerald’s up and coming actress girlfriend makes an impression, as does Pedro Pascal as Rose’s movie star ex boyfriend, mooning around in the  loudest Hawaiian shirt I have ever seen. 

At the centre of all the posing, self obsession and self examination however is Helen, the stranger at the feast.   With more than 70 years in the business on stage and screen, Lois Smith makes her the quiet heart of the film.