An all-star cast in a sex-bombshell comedy about a married couple hoping to spice up their lives
The Invite
Starring Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz & Edward Norton
Directed by Olivia Wilde
R
In theaters Friday, July 10
Apartment couples spend a revealing evening together in The Invite, a saucy grownup comedy that quickly turns into a relationship minefield.
Joe and Angela (Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde) are a San Francisco married pair whose relationship is already rocky, more than just a bit stale and stagnated. Their upstairs neighbors Hawk and his girlfriend, Pina (Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz), don’t have that problem. They make love, frequently and loudly, which irritates Joe considerably.
When Angela invites Hawk and Pina over for a get-to-know-you couples dinner, it sparks an evening of zippy, zappy conversation with more than food on the menu.
Hawk and Pina are swingers into group sex. Joe and Angela are not. At least, not yet.
Wilde, as the director, threads a tricky needle with this ribald “sex comedy” that doesn’t depict any full-on sex and eventually turns into a touching tale about relationships, resets and what it takes for couples to make beautiful music together.
She got her start acting; this is her third movie as a director, following the acclaimed Booksmart (2019) and Don’t Worry Darling (2022). She knows what she’s doing, and gives The Invite a confident, surefooted jolt of sassy comedic bite, from both sides of the camera.
It’s based on a Spanish film called The People Upstairs, which was itself based on a play, and Wilde’s movie feels like somewhat of a return to the story’s roots. It’s set almost entirely inside Joe and Angela’s apartment, like a stage set, where the four characters move through hallways, in and out of rooms as they progress through various emotions and temptations, play the blame game and spill forth their deep secrets. It’s a brisk, snappy spin on the facades—the walls—we often put up to hide behind, and as the old ‘60s song says, the games people play.
And it’s funny. Very funny. Often hilariously funny. Rogen—who plays a music teacher deeply resentful how his life has turned out—has never met a movie he couldn’t spice up with a heh-heh-heh (or a spliff), and he does both here. The conversations in The Invite have real farcical sting and zing. Wilde’s facial expressions run a gamut of comedic reactions and realizations as a woman who feels like something has died inside her, who longs for more but is unsure what it is or how to get it—and who may, in fact, have stumbled upon it.
Cruz, an Oscar winner for Vicky Christina Barcelona, is totally on the money as a tantalizing, Spanish-hottie “sex therapist.” Norton—whose wide-ranging resume includes Fight Club, American History X and Moonrise Kingdom—gets to deliver a revealing soliloquy that sets up a tonal shift that reshapes things in the movie’s final act.
And you won’t see many other films that turn flan, Rolfing, a Sade song, back pain, a collapsible bike and a soufflé into laugh lines.
The movie puts an inventive, contemporary twist on “groundbreaking” couple comedies of years gone by, like Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, and turns its satirical slices and dices into life-mate therapy and waves of personal re-evaluation.
Also worth noting: We find out that Rogen’s Joe met his wife-to-be almost two decades ago, when he played in a band that—to his lingering disappointment—never got its ticket to the big time. But it did have one hit song, which happened to be about Angela. Joe’s resentment becomes a subplot itself and gives a framework of enhanced relevance to the movie’s closing music, a demo of a duet between Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell that became the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young classic “Our House.”
And the film’s onscreen dedication, “To Diane,” is a nod to another emblem of sparkling, generational-defining movie comedies, the late, great Diane Keaton—who I think would have felt right at home in this one, and in this movie “house.”
“We only get a few chances for meaningful relationships in our lives,” Pina says. “What do we all want? To be desired.”
The relationships—and the desires—in The Invite don’t necessarily turn out to go where you think they’re going. The movie zigs when you think it’s going to zag and pumps the brakes when you’re prepared for it to give it more gas.
It keeps you guessing in an exhilarating way, driven by anticipation, discovery, confessionals and surprises, all within the walls of Joe and Angela’s apartment, their home. Ultimately, it arrives at a place where fantasy and reality meet on life’s metaphysical road with parallel lanes of wild and weary—and where two people find what they truly want and need.
—Neil Pond
