Any couple considering attending a screening of Olivia Wilde’s racy new dramedy The Invite should be forewarned. For all of its effective humor and risqué dialogue, the film is a certifiable anti-date movie, part of a cinematic lineage of dyspeptic relationships that stretches back to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Scenes from a Marriage and Husbands and Wives.
As in these antecedents, we meet the central couple, in whose home 99 percent of the movie takes place, in a state of marital disrepair. Seth Rogen’s Joe is a former musician whose band scored a minor hit in the aughts but who is now an associate professor at a lower-tier conservatory. His wife Angela (Olivia Wilde) is a stay-at-home mom to their unseen adolescent daughter, and her myriad decorative touches to their cluttered apartment seek to fill a hole in a life that lacks purpose. Angela describes a recent overhaul of their shower in a vintage style as a “renovation without change,” a wincing metaphor for a relationship stuck in neutral—one of many such load-bearing lines from Will McCormack and Rashida Jones’ elegant screenplay.
In the husk that remains of Angela and Joe’s relationship, neither is satisfied — sexually, emotionally, professionally — and they can’t get through a conversation with it degenerating into bickering and personal attacks, with composer Devonté Hynes’s jagged cello soundtracking the tumult. This time, there’s a concrete reason for their latest sparring session: Angela has invited their Dionysian upstairs neighbors, Pina and Hawk (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton), on the latters’ request, for a dinner party, of which Joe, ailing from a miserable day at work and an aching back, was unaware. Joe and Angela know little of their neighbors outside of the sounds of sexual marathons emanating from their bedroom, which have kept Joe up at night in a stew of anger and envy.
Angela, eager to impress Pina with a spread of Spanish charcuterie (Pina turns out to be vegan), is hoping for an evening of conflict-free bonhomie and to share the results of their recently remodeled apartment. Joe, nihilistic in his desire to burn every bridge he encounters, is single-minded in confronting the neighbors about the porn shoot-level noise pollution trickling through their ceiling. Pina and Hawk, meanwhile, have their own stealth reasons for suggesting a get-together.
Pina, a sexologist, and Hawk, a retired firefighter, have been partnered only a year, and they present as everything their messy hosts are not: still enraptured with each other’s company, cool and collected in the face of conflict — “we love a contentious atmosphere,” Hawk declares upon entering Joe and Angela’s home, having gauged the sourness of their mood through the door — and with an unbothered worldview straight out of Goop. Pina has well-studied opinions on subjects like stress hormones and a home’s feng shui, while Hawk has been studying Rolfing, an alternative-medicine form of body massage, and has become an amateur expert on rugs. When he compliments Angela’s latest purchase of a secondhand floor covering, she beams, basking in the rarity of a kind word. After a few minutes alone with Hawk, famous for his sustained bouts of eye contact (“There’s not a lot of heat” in the apartment, she says, to which he counters, “You never know …”), Angela’s only recourse is Xanax and tequila.
To rehash any more of the plot would be to risk spoilers. The film’s many delights and richly observed truths rely on elements of surprise and gradual tonal shifts, which Wilde handles with extraordinary control. With cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, she paints in unblinking close-ups, astute cutaways and shifts in focus that owe a debt to John Cassavetes, whose mountain of dramas laid the groundwork for films about relationships on the brink.
When necessary, Wilde also emphasizes the spaces between the actors. The well-lived-in apartment setting can create a claustrophobic ambience one moment and suggest a growing chasm between characters the next. Even the clever opening credit sequence, the only time we see Joe and Angela outside their home, splits the actors into multiple screens as they go about their business, establishing lines of division even before their first scene together. A continued visual emphasis on mirrors and windows reinforces ideas of splitting and separation, of a quiet desperation to be seen, even voyeuristically.
McCormack and Jones, both seasoned actors, adapted their script from the 2020 Spanish comedy The People Upstairs, which I haven’t seen. Though if the original captured The Invite’s delicate balance of uncomfortable humor, radical honesty and measured shifts in tone, I would be mightily impressed.
Wilde’s casting couldn’t be better, with Cruz’s effortless sensuality and Norton’s preternatural confidence playing to both performers’ strengths. Rogen, whose trademark cannabis giggle opens the movie in a blurry flashback to better times, ultimately expresses a dramatic depth he seldom has an opportunity to explore elsewhere. But it’s Wilde, under her own direction, who shines the brightest and most complex, as a jumble of nervous energy and suppressed desires whose painfully accurate portrayal of a housewife barely keeping it together is one of the great performances of 2026 thus far.
THE INVITE. Director: Olivia Wilde; Cast: Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton; Distributor: A24; Rated R; now playing at Regal Royal Palm Beach, Cinemark Boynton Beach, Cinemark Bistro Boca Raton and other area theaters