A DEADLY INVITATION/ INVITACION A UN ASESINATO

Spain, 2023, 93 minutes, Colour.

Regina Blandon, Maribel Verdu, Stepaanie Cayo, Manolo Cardona, Aaron Diaz.

Directed by J.M.Cravioto.

A Mexican entertainment, Hispanic/Latin style, characters, locations, situations, motivations… It is the lightest of murder mysteries. And a short running time – with memories of similar tales by popular authors from Agatha Christie on.

The film focuses on a middle-aged pod cast maker, Agatha, Regina Blandon, investigating unsolved mysteries, working with her life-partner. Along with others, she receives an invitation from her half sister, Olivia (Maribel Verdu) to come to visit. The group all arrives, a mixture, Carlos Olivia’s ex-husband, a doctor, a film star who has been a lover, a rival involved in the perfume industry, her partner a yoga instructor. At the house there is an elderly woman who has managed everything as well as a man employed for various tasks, who has lost the use of one eye in an industrial accident.

The film spends time introducing the audience to the characters, indicating some of their backgrounds, the links to Olivia, yet atmosphere of mystery. They sail out into the ocean, different police authorities. Olivia talks the group, indicates how each of them could have murderous intentions towards others, has friendly conversations with Agatha – and then Olivia falls to her death on the deck of the boat.

The police arrive, communications have been cut from the mansion owned by Olivia and Carlos, a young officer put in charge – admiring Agatha’s pod casts and asking her to assist him in the investigation. Which means that it is Agatha’s solving the mystery, searching the house, interrogating, phoning her partner to investigate the backgrounds of the characters.

All kinds of links become clearer, the motivations, the alibis, and the opening up of all kinds of possibilities, especially as regards the younger instructor and the death of his sister in childbirth, a racket concerning the illegal adoption, often in high places, of children taken from single mothers, those responsible for the racket. And the revelations about Olivia’s own health, the death of her own daughter five years earlier in an accident, the identity of her daughter, and the links with Carlos at his hospital and the manager of the estate. And the money given to the blinded man for a transplant.

And, just as we assume that Olivia killed herself, there is a further detail about her health and her death.

The film moves fairly briskly, has a range of characters, twists and unmasking is, and a 93 minutes.