"The Invite"

 ☆☆☆☆☆

There isn't a moment in Olivia Wilde's The Invite that feels false. I haven't seen The People Upstairs, the 2020 movie on which Rashida Jones and Will McCormack based their screenplay for this film, but as an exploration of a specific kind of American mores, values and stressors, The Invite feels wholly new, alive and relevant.

It's also very, very funny. The first thing a comedy like this has to do is make you laugh, and The Invite does, which is why some initial comparisons to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seem off-base — The Invite is a sharply observed, perfectly delivered examination of a certain kind of marriage. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to wonder if Jones and McCormack were eavesdropping on them, especially for the first third of the movie.

In that opening, Seth Rogen and Wilde play Joe and Angela, a married couple in San Francisco who know each other maybe a little too well. They can anticipate almost every word the other will say, yet they have no idea how to adjust their own behavior to that knowledge. When the movie opens, Rogen, a disappointed music teacher, exhausts himself bicycling home. When he gets there, he discovers his wife has been preparing an elaborate dinner for the couple who live upstairs.

This is not what he wants. This is not the time. This is not the day. And there's no wine. Yet, in the way of married couples (straight, gay, young, old — almost any couple will see themselves in this film), she's not going to back down.

Soon enough, there's a knock at the door. It's Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pína (Penelope Cruz), and they are intruding at the worst possible moment for Joe. Then again, Joe doesn't have any best possible moments. Fumbling through an attempt at dinner, the four finally sit down to talk, and it turns out that Hawk and Pína have an ulterior motive. There's something they've been wanting to talk about.

It doesn't take much to find out what the topic is, but I'm not going to reveal it here, and the best way to experience The Invite is not to know it, either. But it's a balm for movie screens that have been beseiged by blockbusters and animated adventures and really loud movies playing in premium formats. The Invite has its sights set both lower and higher than that — it's a decidedly analog affair (Wilde shot it in 35 mm) that finds much more adventure and revelation in conversation than in action.

Eventually, the movie does work itself around to action, at least of a sort, which in turn leads The Invite to the most unexpected of destinations.

Jones and McCormack have crafted a screenplay of uncommon emotional intelligence, and though a lot of the setup is played for laughs, some slapsticky and some awkward, when it gets where it's going, the weight of it all is such that the audience I saw it with stopped the guffawing (there had been a lot of it) and went completely silent.

The Invite deals with the serious, messy, uncomfortable business of being an adult in an uncommonly frank way. The topic at its core is rarely explored in mainstream films, and almost never with this kind of genuine insight and empathy.

As Hawk and Pína challenge Joe and Angela in ways the latter couple could never have imagined when the night began, the movie also challenges the audience to examine long-held views about the way marriages and relationships work. It's serious stuff, but as a director Wilde knows how to handle it — and to balance it with observational, character-driven humor that never feels forced or unwelcome, though often feels like a relief.

In a single set, designed with curious flattening of colors that suggests a lot more about the characters than perhaps it's obvious at the outset, The Invite feels intimate, not claustrophobic. It may be physically constrained, but Norton, Cruz, Wilde and Rogen manage, through the way its characters grow and change in the course of an evening, to make it feel expansive and meaningful.

It's been an uncommonly good year for movies, but The Invite is among the very best of them.

Viewed July 14, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

1920