This Summer’s Most Explosive Dinner-Party Movie & the Best Chamber Films Ever Made
If there’s one thing that our cinema culture is lacking these days, it's big-screen comedy. That fact makes The Invite, a new movie directed by and starring Olivia Wilde, a rare and very welcome phenomenon.
Produced by A24, the movie sees Wilde play the stay-at-home mum of a family of three, which includes her music teacher husband (Seth Rogen) and a 12-year-old daughter we never see. This is because mum and dad have invited the cool upstairs neighbours (Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz) down for dinner—a plan which of course goes haywire before a dish is even served. It’s finely written, finely acted, a little raunchy, and blissfully funny to boot.
The Invite also marks the return of another underserved movie genre: the chamber piece. Aside from the jazzy opening credits sequence of Wilde's movie, all of the drama takes place inside the couples’ capacious and tastefully decorated San Francisco apartment, which becomes a bit of a character, too—not to mention a powder keg as the night unfolds.
All of which got us thinking of all the other great chamber dramas that have come our way over the course of cinema history. In the list below, which is ranked in no particular order, I've rounded up ten of the best. Read on to learn a little more about each of them, including where you can catch them on all the usual platforms.
No need to bury the lede; 12 Angry Men is the greatest chamber piece movie of all time, and it always will be. Set in the deliberation room of a courthouse during a murder trial, it follows the shifting mood of a jury as their prejudices are exposed and explored, one after the other.
Given its single-room setting and dialogue-rich text, it’s the kind of thing that could easily be described as “stagey”. Yet, even though it’s been performed a million times since, the movie is still unmistakably cinematic. Almost 70 years after its release, it also still absolutely rips.
I imagine Wilde won’t be listing it as an influence any time soon, but Roman Polanski’s Carnage is probably the movie that shares the most DNA with her latest project—certainly of the last 25 years.
You’ve got your four distinguished actors (Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet and John C. Reilly), your single apartment location, and your simmering inter-spousal tensions. It might be Polanski, but it’s still a hoot to watch actors of this calibre letting loose and going at it.
If you’re looking for something to get you in the mood for The Invite, this might be the best place to start.
One of the great things about chamber dramas is how economical they are; another is how easily they can be moulded to suit different genres.
James Ward Byrkit started in the industry as a consultant to Gore Verbinski on the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. In 2013, he wrote and directed his first and only feature, a tightly coiled sci-fi chamber piece called Coherence that he put together for the paltry sum of $50,000.
The story focuses on the guests of a dinner party that takes place when the fictional Miller’s Comet is passing through the night sky, creating what appears to be a split in reality en route. It’s best to go into this one a little blind, but if you like the kind of sci-fi thrillers that go deeper into the “sci” of it all (think Primer or Source Code), I highly recommend checking it out.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope is best known these days for being one of the first movies to appear as if it was filmed in a single take. It’s also, however, one of the great classics of the chamber piece genre and a must-see for any Hitch fans out there—especially if you like his more contained and high concept movies, like Rear Window or Lifeboat.
Set in a Manhattan apartment, Rope is about two academics (played by Jimmy Stewart and John Dall) who decide to murder their friend just before a dinner party as a kind of conceptual exercise. It’s not as satisfying as Hitchcock’s best work, but at 81-minutes it gives you plenty to chew on.
If you managed to check out Coherence and are looking for something in a similar vein, The Invitation from 2015 should be right up your alley—a chamber movie that does for psychological horror what that slightly earlier one did for alternate reality science fiction.
The story, like most in this list, is set around a dinner party in a decadent home, this time in the Hollywood hills. Again, the less you know about the plot going into this one, the better, but I will say that the tension builds to a very satisfying finale. Think of it like Carnage by way of cult horror.
Another all-time chamber movie classic that’s perennially being restaged on Broadway and the West End is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The play was originally performed in 1962, but Mike Nichols’ movie adaptation (released four years later) has every right to be considered the definitive version.
Again, it’s a story involving two couples in a single apartment that descends into madness over the course of one evening. This one features the real-life husband-and-wife pairing of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who were in the honeymoon period of what became the first of their two marriages. If you like a little meta energy sprinkled on top, this could be right up your alley.
If you’d rather a chamber piece movie with a little culinary flair—the kind of story that gives a whole new meaning to the idea of a pressure cooker drama—The Menu ticks those boxes with relish.
Released in 2022 and boasting a phenomenal cast led by a rarely better Ralph Fiennes, The Menu is basically like The Bear meets Knives Out, with a light serving of social commentary on the side. Dig in.
Made for just $200K, The Man from Earth is another low-budget chamber classic that's also a sci-fi hidden gem. The setup is deceptively simple—a retiring history professor reveals to his colleagues that he is, in fact, 14,000 years old—but it leads to no shortage of fascinating discussions and ideas.
If you happen to be a fan of Star Trek, and especially the more probing and curious episodes of The Next Generation, you're going to love it.
Of the movies that didn’t quite make the cut, I’ll give an honourable mention to Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight—two powder-keg classics, granted, but both with a few too many flashbacks to really count as chamber pieces, IMHO.
I was also a little on the fence about including Ex Machina as the story plays out over several days. Given that almost all of that time is spent in the compound of Oscar Isaac’s tech megalomaniac, however, I figured it ticked enough boxes.
This one is told from the perspective of a computer programmer who is brought into the mogul’s realm to find out if his latest invention—a humanoid A.I. played by Alicia Vikander—has become self-aware. The movie is the directorial debut of Alex Garland, so if you’ve appreciated his recent work on movies like Civil War and Annihilation, it’s well worth revisiting this one. It’s also never been more timely.
