Picture this: you’re mysteriously invited to your sister’s house. You show up to a group of people who are all connected, for both good and bad reasons, from marriage to betrayal. Your sister has yet to show up. She sends a message to meet her on her yacht for the night. And then, she dies. Suddenly, everyone is a suspect.
Does this story—the plot of A Deadly Invitation—sound familiar? For me, it does.
It’s oddly similar to the plot of Murder Mystery starring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler. It’s also just a classic Clue-style mystery.
In this version of Clue, Agatha (Regina Blandón), a true-crime podcast host, is mysteriously invited to the home of her sister Olivia (Meribel Verdú). Upon her arrival, Agatha finds Olivia’s ex-husband Carlos (Pedro Damián), Olivia’s ex-boyfriend Cary (Manolo Cardona), a doctor named Figue (José María de Tavira), Olivia’s former friend Sonia (Stephanie Cayo) and Sonia’s yoga-teaching boyfriend Naram (Aarón Díaz). As described before, the group is invited to Olivia’s yacht by Doña Cristina (Helena Rojo), a housekeeper of Olivia’s. On the boat, Olivia suggests that someone is going to die, only to end up dead herself.
The rest of the movie is focused on finding out who the murderer is. It had to be someone on the boat, which meant the whole group was interrogated, with Agatha at the forefront of the investigation due to her true-crime podcast skills.
When I first saw the trailer for A Deadly Invitation, I expected more mystery. Rather, the movie was quite predictable in the mystery sense. It was very easy to tell who the murderer was, whereas in other mysteries, I have found it to be harder.
The only parts I couldn’t have seen coming were details about the characters. The characters were all more deeply intertwined than I had expected or known. This was due to a lack of explanation on who was who. I felt that I had started a series on the second movie, but A Deadly Invitation isn’t a series.
Part of my confusion was the language. A Deadly Invitation is a Spanish movie. The audio was able to be put in English but there was writing on the screen that I could not read, making me feel lost. There would be a zoomed-in frame of writing then some realization from the characters, and I had no idea what they were seeing. I appreciate that there was English audio, but Netflix could use subtitles for writing in other languages.
Unfortunately, my confusion due to the language barrier was not the reason I disliked this movie. I can get over bouts of feeling lost within the plot. The problem with this movie is that the plot is overdone. I’m sick of mystery movies being one person within a small group murdered and then the whole group is investigated. It gets boring, especially when done poorly, as it was in A Deadly Invitation.
If I can get to the point where someone is just murdered in a movie and already guess the most likely subject, then go to bed without any wondering of who it could be, then it’s a bad mystery. And that’s exactly what I did with this movie.
Netflix Original Movies are full of overdone, boring plots, and A Deadly Invitation is a perfect example.
