OCS Choc is broadcasting “L’Invitation” this evening, an original OCS Signature thriller starring Guillaume Gouix and Margot Bancilhon, which sees the daily life of a couple turn to anguish and paranoia after their installation in the countryside. Effective and taking.
What is it about ?
Sophie and Nicolas Gravel leave the capital behind them and offer themselves a new life in the provinces with their young son, Maxime. They quickly get to know their neighbors, Angela and Patrice Maupin.
One afternoon, Angela invites Maxime to come and play with their son of the same age. Soon after, Sophie finds her son somewhat extinct and discovers strange marks on his back. Suspicious, she begins to search the life and the past of the Maupins …
Tuesday December 21 at 8:40 p.m. on OCS Choc and available on demand on OCS
Who is it with?
To play Sophie and Nicolas Gravel in this thriller based on the meeting between two opposing couples, director Fred Grivois (Trauma) and OCS have chosen Margot Bancilhon, seen in particular in Five and Ami-ami, and Guillaume Gouix, who was recently in the credits of the series Disparu à toujours and Une Affaire française on Netflix and TF1.
Facing them, Alysson Paradis (QI) and Hubert Delattre (Zone blanche, Paris Police 1900) camp the Maupins, the other couple from L’Invitation. While Marceau Berber, Kolia Abiteboul, Philippe Lebas, Michaël Abiteboul (The Red Bracelets), and Guillaume Labbé (I promise you), decked out in a mullet cut of the most beautiful effect, complete the cast.
Julien Benhamou / OCS
Well worth a look ?
Presented out of competition at the last edition of the La Rochelle TV Fiction Festival, held in September, The Invitation is undoubtedly one of the good surprises of the end of the year 2021, which should delight fans. of thrillers and angst.
The TV movie by Fred Grivois indeed proves, after Cheyenne and Lola and L’Opéra, that OCS is determined to diversify its offer, beyond the comedies or dramedies that it has been offering for a long time, and that it knows how to take risks by going where the other chains, fond of a little too marked thrillers, seldom go.
Aware of the genre in which it fits, between domestic thriller and elevated horror, and respectful of codes, The Invitation, which enjoys a neat aesthetic, does not waste time before plunging us into its heavy atmosphere, through the arrival of the Gravel in a small suburban lodge, somewhere in a countryside that is never really identified.
A little corner of paradise in appearance, for these Parisians in search of a new life, where the calm sought by the couple will quickly give way to fear, with sudden blows of increasingly strange events, intrusions of disturbing homes, disturbing behavior on the part of new neighbors, and mutic children who seem to be hiding dark secrets.
Julien Benhamou / OCS
Starting from the opposition between the Gravel, presented as Parisian bobos not so tolerant as that, and the Maupins, quickly considered as rednecks by their neighbors – she likes cars and makes heavy remarks on the physique of women, she cannot go two minutes without speaking an annoying “Franglais” -, The Invitation gradually turns into paranoia and anxiety.
Efficient and addicting, the thriller by Fred Grivois, which notably finds Margot Bancilhon and Alysson Paradis after Trauma, owes a lot to its actors. Bancilhon and Guillaume Gouix are both excellent, as usual, in the skin of the Gravel, who try to understand why their son returns every time from the house of Maupins with strange marks on the back. And they convince themselves that horrible things are happening in the pavilion next door.
Alysson Paradis and Hubert Delattre, for their part, bring a little comedy to the whole and easily distill the doubt which is supposed to accompany their characters. Even if we would have liked the Maupins to be a little more in-depth, beyond the label of a couple a little handsome and swinger that the writers have stuck to them.
From start to finish, The Invitation, which is part of the original fictions of the OCS Signature label, in any case keeps us in tension, raising its disturbing and distressing atmosphere crescendo. Until a completely crazy ending, which once again turns everything upside down. Do you really know your neighbors? This is a question that one inevitably asks when leaving the viewing of this TV movie that deserves the detour.
