Olivia Wilde (2026)
The Invite is the latest incarnation of what began as a Spanish stage play, Los Vecinos de Arriba (The People Upstairs), performed in 2015. The author, Cesc Gay, turned the play into a 2020 film called Sentimental. Since then, Gay’s original has been adapted for cinema in Italy (2022), Switzerland (2023), France (2024) and South Korea (2025). Olivia Wilde’s film, written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones and in which the director co-stars, is this year’s version of the piece. You can see why it’s proving widely serviceable. Although Wilde opens up the material at the very start, The Invite is a four-hander nearly all of whose action takes place in a single San Francisco apartment: the setting and themes are easily transferable from one urban environment to another. Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen) live below Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) who, at Angela’s suggestion, join her and Joe for an evening – for the first time. Angela and Joe are married, Pina and Hawk unmarried partners. It’s the husband and wife who are conspicuously unhappy with each other. Olivia Wilde announces this instantly on the screen through her namesake Oscar’s epigram, ‘One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry’. As might be expected, the get-together proves to be an eye-opener for both couples, but The Invite is chiefly the hosts’ story.
When the invite was issued is a matter of dispute. Joe – hot and bothered, at the end of his tether with the fold-up bike that his wife bought and makes him use – arrives home to find Angela busy in the kitchen. Once she’s instructed Joe to remove his shoes, she tells him why she’s busy and insists she told him yesterday that Pina and Hawk would be coming this evening – hasn’t Joe bought the wine they’d agreed he’d pick up on the way home? Joe is equally sure this is the first he’s heard about the visitors. The night is still young when Pina happens to vindicate Joe by mentioning it was just this morning that she and Hawk bumped into Angela, and she invited them over. The two couples are noisy in different ways. When Pina and Hawk arrive outside the apartment, they can hear Angela and Joe arguing furiously inside. Once the conversation has moved beyond the icebreaking stage, it emerges that Pina and Hawk do a lot of high-volume lovemaking. This is a sore point for Angela and Joe who can not only hear what’s going on but haven’t had sex for over a year. They do, though, unlike Pina and Hawk, have a child – an early-teen daughter, Maggie, out of the apartment on a sleepover.
Pina introduces herself as a psychotherapist and sexologist with a particular interest in women’s issues. Hawk used to be a firefighter (it’s a running joke that Joe and Angela repeatedly say ‘fireman’ and Hawk corrects them); he has since retrained as a ‘Rolfing’ masseur. Joe and Angela met at art college: he was subsequently in a short-lived indie rock band and now teaches at a third-rate music school; Angela gave up an art-based career to become a homemaker. Pina and Hawk’s lines of work and interests justify their persistently candid questions and proposal of a foursome: the hosts’ astonishment at this leads the guests to scale the proposal down to two couplings – Pina/Joe, Hawk/Angela. As Pina already knew but Joe didn’t until now, Hawk once spotted Angela through a window, walking naked to the bedroom after showering. Their eyes met; since then, Angela has enjoyed making a habit of being glimpsed au naturel by Hawk. When Joe and Pina happen to be in the lift together, he always, according to Pina, stares at her breasts.
Although Joe is flabbergasted at first, he and Pina are about to get it together when he overbalances while pulling off his trousers, falls and hurts his back. The accident catalyses a succession of further revelations, major and minor. Learning that Hawk’s real forename isn’t so awe-inspiring – it’s Howard – Joe is sarcastically delighted. Until he also learns that Howard decided to rename himself after his wife died of cancer and he tried to move on (and hooked up with his therapist, Pina). Joe’s resentment that he failed as a musician is presented as the reason for the failure of his marriage. He loves Maggie, though – as does Angela: Pina thinks she and Joe shouldn’t stay together for the sake of a child whom they’re probably making as miserable as themselves. ‘But you’re not my patients,’ admits Pina; as soon as she and Hawk return upstairs, Angela and Joe start tentatively to try and mend their relationship.
The Invite has a well-constructed script, with plenty of sharp dialogue, and an expert cast. Seth Rogen has what’s probably the plum role because Joe is usually a subversive at the gathering, but it’s a protean subversiveness: at first, he won’t join in with small talk; then keeps puncturing his companions’ various pretensions; then, when the conversation shifts into more sexually daring territory, is a regular guy who can’t believe his ears. Rogen does all this very well. Penelope Cruz is excellent, too – not just embodying but subtly sending up the exotic sex-bomb persona. Edward Norton does fine work in his less showy part, especially when super-cool Hawk reveals his personal tragedy: Norton gives an authentic feel to the unsuspected aspects of his character’s personality that come through at this point, but you wouldn’t put it past Hawk to be inventing a sob story. In this company, Olivia Wilde’s acting is relatively shallow; in the early stages, she does her performance no favours through choices she makes as director. After Joe has slunk out of his last class of the day, his frazzling journey home is shown in a montage of images that share a split screen with his wife’s frantic preparations for the evening ahead. By the time he gets in, Wilde’s playing of Angela’s hyper anxiety just feels like more of the same.
Olivia Wilde hits her directing stride once the quartet is all together, though – varying the tempo adroitly through nearly all the rest of the film, until the very last scene. I could have done with a briefer closing reconciliation between Joe and Angela, as he starts to pick out a tune on the long-unused piano in the apartment. This turns into a marital duet all the more protracted when the tune choice is so neatly apt – ‘(I’m) Confessin’ (that I Love You)’. (The faltering piano instrumental complements a zany, faster, sung version of the number, heard during the opening titles.) The story’s events and revelations combine to raise interesting questions. How can it be that Angela really is desperate for things to go well socially but really hasn’t told Joe they’re expecting guests? How come she didn’t buy the wine herself, along with all the Spanish cheese and charcuterie and olives and almonds that she puts on the table (only to discover that Pina won’t touch meat or dairy products)? Is this just careless plotting – or is it meant to signify that Angela’s priority all along is not to be a perfect host or to contrive a way of seeing more of Hawk but, rather, to up the ante in the discord between her and Joe? (Maybe she wants to demonstrate that, if he were a decent husband, he’d rush back out and get wine the moment he finds out it’s needed urgently.)
Joe’s pants-down pratfall and enraged reaction to the back massage that Hawk insists on giving him, come as striking relief after the barbed remarks but rarely raised voices that have dominated since Pina and Hawk’s arrival on the scene. The brief outburst of physical action and uncontrolled anger is even more welcome because The Invite is claustrophobic beyond the requirements of the set-up. I’ve no idea what differences there are in the various adaptations of Cesc Gay’s original. But this anglophone version, at least, seems intent on gratifying and flattering the target audience – viewers who will recognise and chuckle at the privileged characters’ preoccupations and phoniness but, in due course, also be moved by the-true-pain-these-people-have-known-or-are-going-through. Moved, that is, to audience self-satisfaction, which left this member of the audience feeling queasy. The Invite is entertaining and accomplished in ways that matter but I don’t much like it.
7 July 2026
