Director Olivia Wilde’s witty, uproarious, and ultimately heartrending third feature, The Invite, opens with a famous Oscar Wilde quote. “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”
But does marriage really destroy love? And if love indeed fades, with deep-seated resentments settling in between a codependent couple, what feeling replaces it? For Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen), the central couple who set the gears of this smart, grown-up dramedy in motion before their alluring upstairs neighbors (Edward Norton’s Hawk and Penélope Cruz’s Piña) join them, emotions run troublingly high between anger and indifference. On the surface, Angela and Joe have everything they need: a gorgeous and historic San Francisco apartment that they’re in the midst of thoughtfully restoring (apparently, “renovation without change” is a thing), a daughter they’ve been raising with love, and most of all, one another to lift up and lean on. But underneath all that, they seem to have lost something fundamental in their fraught relationship that’s way overdue to receive its own thoughtful renovation: a belief in and respect for each other, if their blame-filled bickering is any indication.
A marital strife tale of this sort can go anywhere. In Wilde’s capable hands, it turns into a sophisticated four-hander comedy that honors the spirit of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a single-location flick that feels every bit as cinematic as her irresistibly propulsive teen comedy, Booksmart (2019), and beautifully crafted Stepford Wives-adjacent thriller, Don’t Worry Darling (2022). It’s the kind of movie Hollywood mostly forgot that adult audiences still want and deserve. You know, exhausted couples airing out their private grievances with piercing zingers, ravenously embracing erotic possibilities, and sharpening their verbal combat tactics in such relatable missives that our laughter often lands with bittersweet recognition. No matter how far-fetched this dinner-party-gone-hysterically-wrong is, any of these people could be, well…any one of us.
Perhaps the first character we get to relate to here is the curmudgeonly Joe. A failed musician who now makes a living as a teacher, he comes home after a long day, having pedaled his comical bike up the notorious hills of his town. Who could blame him if the last thing he wants is entertaining people, much less the unknowable couple from upstairs who’ve been keeping him up at night with their loud sex noises into the wee hours? Then again, the equally hardworking Angela—now raising a family and remodeling a home after giving up on her own career—surely deserves a fun night with fun strangers. Insisting that she mentioned the gathering to the clueless Joe, she puts out a massive cheese-and-charcuterie board, pours herself a healthy serving of bubbly from their already limited alcohol supply, and fields Joe’s grumbling. What starts as a quarrel quickly turns into a full-blown fight, with Hawk and Piña hearing most of it on the other side of their door. Strap in, because we’re only getting started.
An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film Sentimental (or, The People Upstairs, which was formerly Gay’s stage play) by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, The Invite escalates in tension and humor in well-calibrated doses, with every jab and fiery conflict amid the four players moving the dramatic and comedic needles with purpose. Brilliantly styled with a vintage sensibility by costume designer Arianne Phillips, Angela almost wants to drink up the energy of Hawk and Piña, a couple so obviously into one another that they radiate with desire. Joe, on the other hand, is skeptical of this pair who brag about their erotic adventures with additional partners freely, like it’s no big deal. And by the way, would Joe and Angela consider joining them sometime, maybe even tonight?
Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz as Hawk and Piña.
Wilde and Rogen portray their respective characters who are in desperate need of some loosening up (sexually and otherwise) with a droll and playful sense of possibility, softening their insecure and brittle edges gradually like a pair of kids allowed to stay up past their bedtime for the first time. Norton, on the other hand, infuses the picture with the enchanting agility of his smile and gestures as the ex-firefighter Hawk, fully earning our love when he delivers a revealing monologue about his past. His friskiness is met, sometimes surpassed, by Cruz’s enigmatic aura and cheeky quips as psychotherapist and sexologist Piña, a woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to express it. The comic timing amid the four is so pitch-perfect (with various instances of animated crosstalk that you should listen closely to catch all the fast-and-furious jokes), so organic in its cadence that it’s easy to imagine Wilde weighing every single character detail along with the actors playing them. Elsewhere, Wilde navigates the Bay Area flat studiously alongside cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, making use of every doorway, corner, mirror, window, and nook and cranny to observe the characters’ isolation vs. occasional unity in flawless, densely textured long takes.
A self-professed fan of Mike Nichols (whose directing debut came with his stunning iteration of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, and whose masterful Birdcage featured another eventful dinner party of errors), Wilde inherently seems to know just what sentiment to capture in any given scene, and how to choreograph a lively debate for the most intense emotional impact. Meanwhile, the space itself (surprisingly, not a real apartment and impressively built inside a studio) tells us a story, too. Dressed with countless lived-in details touched by Angela’s classic tastes, the apartment almost defiantly projects the couple’s joint history, despite the fact that they might no longer have much of a future together. Completing the package is Dev Hynes’s nervy score of chromatic strings that doubles the anxiety and claustrophobia that flow freely throughout the movie, one that often teases a much darker genre feature lurking beneath the surface. Forget Backrooms; try this apartment if you dare.
Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde as Joe and Angela.
It wouldn’t be fun to spoil where the night leads the quartet, but it’s worthwhile to consider a word of wisdom from Piña, whose relationship expertise feels legitimate due to none other than the famous Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel being a consultant on the film. That wisdom (which will be foreign to no one who follows Perel’s work) goes something like this: You can end a relationship and move on to someone else. Or you can end the current relationship to start a new one with the same person. This is about when the laughter ends, and in an ingeniously controlled shift in tone, something inside of us shatters.
I’m unsure if Wilde meant it in that way, but where Angela and Joe are headed could very well be in the eye of the beholder after the film’s soul-stirringly sweet and perfect parting note. To find out, you’ll need to RSVP yes to this restorative invite, and you’ll be all the better for it.
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