The Uninvited: Nadia Conners makes the anxieties of these Hollywood A-listers feel relatable

Nadia Conners’ The Uninvited is a Hollywood Hills psychodrama; its caustic, quippy vision of flawed showbiz professionals stumbling through a dark night of the soul sits at the intersection of The Player (1992) and Sunset Blvd. (1950). Originally conceived as a stage play, the film is heavy on theatrical conceits and broadly delineated metaphors, like the complimentary ‘aura photography’ offered to the guests at the exclusive gathering that serves as the story’s backdrop.

The vibes, as they say, are off, and the tension in the movie derives from waiting out the inevitable exposition behind each character’s personal hovering dark cloud. We begin on a moment of wry cognitive dissonance, with Rose Wright (Elizabeth Reaser), a talented actress in her early forties, being told that she’s ageing out of movie-mom roles just as she is trying to get her six-year-old son ready for bed. It ’d be easier for Rose to come to terms with the myriad cruelties of her industry if her husband Sammy (Walton Goggins), a well connected talent manager, could cool it on his swaggering shark act. The pair’s barely sublimated resentments threaten to boil over even before their house party receives an unexpected guest.

Helen (Lois Smith) is 90 years old and seemingly lost. She’s there because she believes the Wrights’ home is her former place of residence, and she won’t take no for an answer. Plonking herself down on a couch in the living room – ostensibly to wait for somebody to come pick her up – Helen becomes a sounding board for the variously agitated people around her, as well as a mirror of sorts for Rose, who goes from seeing the older woman as an interloper to recognising her as a kindred spirit.

There are other vivid figures here, including a couple of nicely rendered slimeballs: Gerald (Rufus Sewell), Sammy’s biggest client, a model of smoothly practiced egomania, and Lucien (Pedro Pascal), another alpha-male movie star (and Rose’s former lover) who uses charm to mask a set of unflattering insecurities. The various clandestine professional and romantic entanglements in The Uninvited are diverting enough (and the actors are all on form) but what’s most effective – and affecting – is the way that Helen’s presence puts the script’s deeper themes of ageing and loss out in the open. Satirising the lavish insularity of A-listers is easy, and fairly typical of indie releases, which thrive on self-reflexivity. Enfolding such critiques into a movie that addresses tender and universal anxieties about what it means to be remembered (and also to forget) is harder, and the humane touch of the final sequences makes Conners’ debut into a small but real achievement.

► The Uninvited is in UK cinemas 9 May.