A dinner 'Invitation'? What could go wrong?

Karyn Kusama's taut "The Invitation" is smarter than your standard reunion dinner tale gone horribly awry. It plants all the clues right out in the open - including a foreshadowing scene in which main dude Will (Logan Marshall-Green) mercy-kills a coyote that bolted into the path of his automobile on his way to a party.

To be precise, it's an awkward, wary reunion for nine old friends with two other guests at the isolated, upscale home of David (Michiel Huisman) and Eden (Tammy Blanchard), who we discover had a now-dead child with Will earlier.

In "The Invitation," written with genre-bending zeal by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, the bearded Will resembles Charles Manson, but he rejects the stupid behavior in mad slasher films. He's smart, and he notices stuff that we viewers notice.

Like why are there bars over the windows and why does David insist on locking the front door out in the boonies? (Reply: Home invaders have hit the area. OK. Good answer.)

But Will's Spidey sense never stops tingling. Or could it be Theodore Shapiro's nerve-tormenting score, employed to excess even when nothing scary is happening?

"There's something wrong!" Will tells his new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi), Yet, everything that alarms him is easily dismissible as old-fashioned paranoia.

A stranger among them, David's guest Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch), is a quietly lumbering fellow who breaks into an emotional confession about how he accidentally killed his wife during a dispute. Nothing creepy about that.

Kusama constructs a much tighter, more atmospheric thriller here than she did in the slack "Jennifer's Body," a waste of Lemont native Diablo Cody's genre screenplay.

Still, "The Invitation" suffers from occasional eye-rolling moments, such as Will's failure to pick up a conveniently dropped gun. Twice.