Olivia Wilde’s third behind-the-camera feature (following Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling) sports four excellent lead performances—including hers—that turn this combative dramedy (premiering at the Sundance Film Festival) into a hysterical, insightful, and ultimately moving portrait of the difficulties of keeping long-term relationships alive.
A modern twist on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that adds a few momentous sexual wrinkles to its template, The Invite—a remake of the 2020 Spanish comedy The People Upstairs—takes place almost entirely in the San Francisco apartment of Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde).
Upon arriving home from work following a lengthy and arduous ride on his folding bike, Joe collapses on the foyer floor, moaning about his chronic back pain. That’s not the sole thing he’s soon decrying, since Angela reminds him that tonight is the night they’re hosting their upstairs neighbors for dinner—a get-together for which Angela has prepared a lavish spread and purchased a new living room rug.
Joe doesn’t remember being told about this event and didn’t buy the wine Angela apparently asked him to pick up, and her annoyance amplifies as her music-teacher spouse eats the cheese she’s serving, tries to convince her to cancel, and complains about their impending guests, who have been driving him mad with their “floor-shaking animal f--king.”
Angela is less perturbed about this noise because she covets the scream-inducing orgasms she hears through the ceiling, just as she admires her female neighbor’s beauty. Joe and Angel’s bond is a tense one, and their bickering quickly reaches a crescendo, at which point, in amusingly ill-timed fashion, their company arrives.
That would be Pina (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), whose ridiculous name Joe immediately ridicules. Rogen’s malcontent finds plenty of additional things distasteful about Hawk, since he’s a soft-spoken nice guy who responds to his host’s mockery with unflappable friendliness.
Awkwardness abounds at the start of this meet-up, as Pina and Hawk could hear Joe and Angela arguing through their door. Angela’s discovery that Pina doesn’t eat dairy, grains, or meat—including the Spanish jamón she bought to impress her—exacerbates the borderline-calamitous mood. So too does a badly burned soufflé that, with a bit of hilarious sleight of hand, Angela swiftly, nonchalantly tosses in the garbage before Pina or Hawk notice the ruined dish.
The Invite is all talk and little truth, at least when it comes to Joe and Angela. Showing off the expansive changes recently made to their apartment, the latter puts on a performance intended to wow her guests and to offset her fears about herself, her home, and her marriage. The former, on the other hand, can barely stifle his grievances about Pina and Hawk’s carnal cacophony.
Working from Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s witty and generous screenplay, Wilde gives all four of her stars ample opportunities to make a distinctive impression, with Norton’s emotive and attentive Hawk revealing that he’s a former firefighter who’s now infatuated with rugs, and Pina radiating effortless eroticism while discussing her work as both a psychologist and, suitably, a sexologist.
As they settle in Joe and Angela’s living room, the quartet divulges details about their lives (such as Joe’s rock-band past), thereby providing context for the fraught dynamics at play, and the film’s writing is so astute and humorous that it’s a shame Wilde’s framing is look-at-me invasive.
Using mirrors, doorways, shallow focus, and the edges of the screen to literally separate Joe and Angela as a means of reflecting their estrangement—a tack that’s in sharp contrast to the compositions featuring Pina and Hawk—The Invite proves a study in self-consciousness, and that extends to the anxious strings of Devonté Hynes’ score. It’s not that these tactics are, in light of the story, inapt. Rather, it’s that they’re employed with such incessant aggressiveness that they’re intensely distracting and radiate a measure of insecurity that’s at odds with the confident script.
Despite Wilde’s overcompensating stewardship, The Invite is a comic rollercoaster in which Angela, Joe, Pina, and Hawk circle each other, pair up, square off, and come back together to unpredictable ends. The film’s ebb and flow is tumultuous but assured, and the cast makes the most of their meaty roles. Rogen’s sarcastic wisecracks are laced with barely suppressed hostility that electrifies his rapport with the calm and composed Norton, and Wilde is equally adept as a wife and mother who’s so miserably high-strung that even the slightest compliment brings her to tears.
Of the four, Cruz is the most straightforward, her seductive Pina a more familiar type. The longer this night goes on, however, the more she reveals unique layers that speak to the proceedings’ focus on harmony and unrest, pleasure and anguish, candor and deception, and love and desire.
The Invite roils its waters by dropping a bombshell twist at its midway point that complicates things to an uproarious and surprisingly emotional degree. It also grants its actors new, fruitful avenues to explore. No matter how they’re matched in a given scene, Rogen, Wilde, Norton, and Cruz exhibit alternately playful and hostile chemistry, and by the film’s conclusion, they manage to wring poignancy from the hurt, grief, resentment, and longing at the root of Joe and Angela’s on-the-rocks union.
Though its direction never quits trying to get in the way, The Invite remains droll up until the bitter end, when scorched-Earth vitriol exposes the genuine divisions between its antagonistic protagonists. Nevertheless, with a series of beautifully tender closing notes, it illustrates that honesty is the key to a successful marriage—and that, even in the face of deeply rooted acrimony, it’s possible to achieve, per Angela, “renovations without changes.”
