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What a time for Hollywood to throw a party. Los Angeles is still processing Donald Trump’s recent vow to save the “DYING” American film business, and here comes The Uninvited, an edgy little drama of one night among Hollywood people, tinged with glitz and panic. The production at least should meet with the approval of the administration — it is shot wholly on location in LA, the way movies once were before the exodus of filmmaking from the city.
But for now the La La remains firmly in place. We soon meet an “aura photographer”. Upstairs, someone will do cocaine in a child’s en-suite bathroom. But first we open to palm trees, a pool so blue that David Hockney could have painted it — and a heavy sigh.
This being LA, the sigh comes from an actress in middle age. As such, she isn’t working. Her name is Rose (Elizabeth Reaser), and her agent husband, Sammy (Walton Goggins, lately of The White Lotus), has invited a set of industry notables to their handsome retro villa in the Hollywood Hills. The night is clearly a big deal. Exactly why is the subject of a breadcrumb trail smartly laid by writer-director Nadia Conners. Pedro Pascal plays a newly sober A-lister; Rufus Sewell a roguish kingpin director.
There is also a surprise package: a confused elderly woman (Lois Smith) arrives at the gates claiming to have lived here when she too was a Hollywood star.
Shades of Sunset Boulevard? Of course. No one will ever set a movie about moviemakers in these parts and not make you think about that deathless classic, or Mulholland Drive for that matter. Despite the haunted glamour, though, The Uninvited plays less like David Lynch than a night out at the theatre. The framing is tight, the tempo brisk, the dialogue peppy. Amid finger foods and bombshells of intrigue, you might even see a murder mystery coming.
But no. Inner lives are the stuff of the movie, the kind we’re asked to imagine even a Hollywood agent having. Meanwhile, Rose emerges as a consummate host, excellent wife and mother, and deeply conflicted about every life decision she’s ever made.
Reaser does a fine line in buried anger. Yet the mood is really more wry than raging. Like the party it portrays, the movie seems to be happening at the junction of the professional and social. Off screen, Conners and Goggins are married, and Pascal a friend. It comes as no surprise to learn that the house the film was shot in (for less than $1mn) belongs to another pal. As a model for Hollywood’s future, it may have limits.
Midway through, Sewell gets a hoot of a speech about the messianic role of directors in people’s lives. In other words, these are Tinseltown types old-school enough for Trump to recognise. But the film still feels like an elegy. Some of that comes in references to leaving town, and dark visions of “coming storms”. But a lot is hidden in plain sight.
Long a career supporting player, Goggins now supplies star power after a bump in status through The White Lotus and other streaming hits. Pascal too can these days plausibly play a movie idol after more streaming success in The Last of Us. “I’m still big,” went the famous line in Sunset Boulevard. “It’s the pictures that got small.” All these years later, they’re still only getting smaller.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from May 9
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