OVERVIEW
Joe is a music teacher, and Angela is a stay-at-home mom, and they are in a marital crisis. Despite Joe’s objections, Angela invites their upstairs neighbors, Pína and Hawk, who seem effortlessly in sync, over for dinner. They arrive relaxed and confident, then immediately step into the middle of a fight. The rest of the evening is a series of awkward attempts to recover, made worse by Pína and Hawk’s openness about their relationship and sex, which exposes Joe and Angela’s mismatched expectations and buried resentments to their guests.
BACKGROUND
This is Olivia Wilde’s third film as a director, after Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling, and it fits her habit of working inside familiar structures while updating the tone and the language for a modern audience. If Booksmart refreshed the coming-of-age comedy and Don’t Worry Darling tried (and emphasis on “tried”) to modernize the Stepford Wives template into a contemporary thriller, The Invite is a smaller take on the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? style of couple warfare, built as a chamber piece with four performers and uncomfortable conversations that keep escalating. It is the kind of film that lives or dies on the chemistry of its cast and the script, and Wilde has said the shoot benefited from working in order and letting the actors improvise freely on set.
EXECUTION
The movie is a clear step up for Wilde, and she feels far more comfortable here as an actor-director than she did as a thriller director. She trusts her cast, lets the performances breathe, and guides scenes that grow increasingly uneasy without losing control of the rhythm. The script usually finds a workable balance between comedy and drama, with jokes that also function as character beats.
The film is at its best whenever Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton are on screen. They bring a more mature, lived-in presence than the lead couple, and the funniest, sharpest moments come from that contrast. Pína explaining a condition to Joe through a metaphor involving his balls, or snapping at him for trying to joke right after Hawk shares something sincere, are the scenes most likely to get real laughs.
That contrast also creates the film’s biggest believability problem. Pína and Hawk feel so far ahead of Joe and Angela that it’s hard to believe they would stay this invested for an entire night, especially when the lead couple can be grating and the casting widens the gap. Rogen leans into the familiar man-child persona he has been cultivating for two decades, and Wilde’s screen presence carries a natural confidence that the film never fully reconciles with Angela’s insecurities, making the couple’s problems feel a bit manufactured.
Wilde’s direction has strong tone control, but the movie still plays like a collection of very good scenes that never quite adds up to a very good film. Some turns feel accepted because the script needs them, not because the escalation earns them. And while it is refreshing to see a mainstream American film let adults talk this openly about sex, it can feel more adult-coded than adult-observed, as if the frankness is the point. As a remake of the Spanish 2020 comedy The People Upstairs, it also seems to stop at the shock of description rather than pushing toward sharper punchlines or more genuinely lived-in conclusions.
AFTERTASTE
The actors keep The Invite fun, and the scene-to-scene craft is often sharp, but it never adds up to the comedic and dramatic impact it is aiming for. It is still an improvement for Wilde as a director, and it is refreshing to see a mainstream American comedy go this adult, even if the film ends up feeling more adult-coded than genuinely lived-in.