The Invite will be released in select theaters on June 26 before receiving a wide release on July 10.
Olivia Wilde’s double date dramedy The Invite achieves the kind of artistic maturity and formal control that was missing from her first two features, teen comedy Booksmart and scattered sci-fi Don’t Worry Darling. Although a nearly scene-for-scene remake on paper, it’s arguably Wilde’s first good feature for the way it imbues the story of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish original, Sentimental (or The People Upstairs) — and its subsequent Italian, Swiss, French, and South Korean versions — with energy and intensity from minute one.
Penned by Toy Story 4 scribes Will McCormack and Rashida Jones (yes, the actress), and purchased by A24 after its Sundance bow, The Invite follows a middle-aged couple on the rocks who host their attractive upstairs neighbors for dinner before one thing leads to the next. Its swinger/spouse-swap premise disguises a pressurized tale of domestic discontent, crowbarred open by exotic curiosities. In the process, its impeccably cast characters are forced to leave everything about themselves on the table… or at least, more of themselves than they’re comfortable with. This psychological unspooling holds your attention right up until it can’t; the film eventually peters out, but only near the very end, leaving quite an enjoyable experience in its wake.
Seth Rogen plays Joe, the film’s ostensible protagonist, whose life as a failed pop punk musician in the aughts has given way to a mundane music teaching job in California. He bicycles home at his wife’s behest, leading to a snappy introduction rife with split-screens and other economical tricks that introduce us to his high-strung spouse, Angela (Wilde), who meticulously prepares their apartment for a fancy evening while their tween daughter is away. Unbeknownst to Joe — though according to Angela, he simply forgot — they’re meant to host their idiosyncratic neighbors for an informal dinner, the prospect of which sends the unhappy couple spiraling through never-ending disagreements.
Wilde’s 107-minute version (about half an hour longer than the original) smartly delays both the arrival of the guests and their eventual proposition. This allows The Invite to marinate in the awkward atmosphere of a married couple putting on a cheery façade that threatens to crack at any moment. Joe and Angela barely talk to each other anymore, at least not in a way that doesn’t involve petty sniping, and to make matters more uncomfortable, their guests — the frank, filterless firefighter Hawk (Edward Norton) and his free-spirited therapist girlfriend Piña (Penélope Cruz) — see right through their ruse and aren’t afraid to call it out.
The ensuing evening is a tale of dysfunction forced into temporary alignment (and beyond that, painful honesty) by Hawk and Piña’s apparent harmony. Still in their honeymoon phase, the alluring guests are so seemingly in sync emotionally and sexually that their explosive lovemaking has long been heard by Joe and Angela downstairs. It’s a disturbance the hosts argue about bringing up, a minor point from which much of their conflict stems and which is subsequently magnified, including and especially their compunctions around sexual liberation. Maybe they’re too prudish for an orgy, but they’re certainly willing to demonstrate otherwise if only to prove each other wrong, leading to some hilarious escalations.
Wilde and cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra capture each conversation with dizzying verve, as though any given interaction were a make-or-break moment for the hosts. Their relationship rests on a knife’s edge, a sensation that Wilde carries throughout her haggard performance as a woman who struggles to see herself through anyone else’s eyes, or as anything but a bored, unattractive housewife. Wilde, despite being a conventionally beautiful Hollywood star, plays this insecurity in immensely convincing ways. Rogen, meanwhile, portrays a husband tipping so far over the edge of unhappiness that he practically exists in constant free-fall. He smooths over difficult conversations with weed and poorly-timed jokes at everyone else’s expense, and cuts through the film’s overlapping dialogue like a hissing pipe.
Norton and Cruz play their opposites in fascinating ways, with an air of shocking honesty and self-confidence concerning their bodies and sexual proclivities. They disguise all of this under and around the conventions of polite conversation, even though they have only one goal in mind: sleeping with their hosts. Wilde captures this objective through careful movement and blocking as the characters move throughout the film’s single location, before she suddenly peels back the layers of the guests’ dysfunctions too. All the while, composer Devonté Hynes ping-pongs between jagged and melodic notes to mirror the characters’ states of mind before remarkably building to the familiar, seductive tones of Georges Bizet’s classic opera, Carmen; the Habanera has rarely sounded so mischievous.
All these wonderful aesthetic setups, however, demand payoffs the film isn’t really willing to engage with. Wilde’s remake goes much further with its chemistry and sensuality than Gay’s — whose version feels intentionally more mundane — but it cuts itself off at the knees without offering Joe and Angela a complete glimpse of the emotions and sensations their marriage has long been missing. Its climactic scenes seldom replace the movie’s initial bursts of energy with anything nearly as engaging or enveloping.
When it slows down to really dig into its characters and unveil their emotional cores, The Invite runs out of steam, becoming stilted and stage-like until eventually, its conclusions teeter halfway between something definitive or cathartic and hauntingly open-ended. It is perhaps a fitting irony that a film so effective at portraying festering discontent should close in such a dissatisfying fashion. Then again, accidentally or otherwise, few films more honestly replicate how a dwindling relationship feels like a chess game at stalemate.
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