The invite

A dinner invitation can be an act of generosity, a social obligation or, in the wrong apartment, the opening move in emotional warfare. In Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, it becomes all three. Angela and Joe, played by Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen, are a married San Francisco couple whose relationship has settled into a bruising routine of corrections, sarcastic remarks and arguments about objects that do not matter. A pickle taken from a carefully arranged platter, an unnecessary rug or a forgotten bottle of wine can ignite hostilities because each trivial grievance carries years of accumulated disappointment. Their twelve-year-old daughter is spending the night elsewhere, leaving them alone with a dinner Angela has organized for their upstairs neighbours—an arrangement Joe claims he knew nothing about. Even before the doorbell rings, the apartment feels less like a home than a beautifully decorated pressure cooker.

The guests are Piña and Hawk, embodied with mischievous confidence by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. They appear to possess everything their hosts have misplaced: ease, desire, curiosity and an apparently uncomplicated intimacy. They are also responsible for the spectacularly noisy sexual encounters that regularly travel through the ceiling. Joe wants to complain; Angela is simultaneously embarrassed, fascinated and perhaps secretly envious. The contrast is immediately comic. Angela has prepared an elaborate meal, only to discover that Piña’s dietary restrictions exclude much of it, while the soufflé steadily approaches disaster. In one wonderfully uncomfortable exchange, Angela presents Hawk with three nearly identical shades intended for the bedroom walls. Where Joe sees the same pale grey repeated three times, Hawk invents a different sensual landscape for each colour. Angela’s reaction is funny, but also painful: a virtual stranger has paid more attention to her creative choices in a few seconds than her husband seemingly has in years.

Adapted by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack from Sentimental, the Spanish film and stage work created by Cesc Gay, The Invite belongs to the tradition of dinner-party dramas in which good manners gradually surrender to confession. Comparisons with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are inevitable, but this is a warmer, more sexually contemporary variation on that model. The evening’s second and far more consequential invitation forces Angela and Joe to consider not simply whether they desire their neighbours, but whether they still believe themselves capable of being desired at all. That distinction gives the comedy its melancholy undertow. The film is frank about non-monogamy, jealousy, ageing bodies and dormant appetites, yet its real subject is the quieter terror of realizing that the person beside you remembers a version of you that may no longer exist.

The four actors understand that the dialogue is funniest when nobody appears to be delivering a joke. Seth Rogen uses his familiar incredulity and wounded laugh as defensive weapons, but Joe’s cynicism is never merely comic; it conceals professional frustration, depression and shame over the musician he failed to become. Olivia Wilde gives Angela a restless physical energy, moving through the apartment as if one more adjusted cushion might restore order to her life. Her eagerness to please can be exhausting, but it also reveals a woman desperate to be noticed. Edward Norton initially makes Hawk’s enlightened vocabulary and serene masculinity seem faintly ridiculous, then allows unexpected vulnerability to disturb that polished surface. Best of all, Penélope Cruz refuses to reduce Piña to an exotic fantasy. Her sensual assurance is genuine, but so are her intelligence, watchfulness and capacity for cruelty. When Piña speaks about children absorbing the anxiety of unhappy parents, the movie abruptly removes the protective layer of farce.

As a director, Olivia Wilde handles the single-location structure with considerable assurance. Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra’s 35mm photography gives the apartment warmth without making it safe; rooms that initially look spacious seem to contract as secrets emerge. The camera circles conversations, catches glances from doorways and occasionally places us close enough to feel like an additional guest who has stayed far too late. Editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys keep the evening moving despite its theatrical foundations, although some transitions from verbal combat to emotional revelation remain conspicuously engineered. The score by Devonté Hynes brings playful sophistication, but its early insistence occasionally tells us how to interpret exchanges that are already perfectly clear. The film can also become overly enamoured with therapeutic language, explaining certain emotional dynamics after the actors have communicated them more effectively through silence, posture and avoidance.

Those imperfections do not diminish the pleasure of seeing a smart, adult comedy take marriage seriously without treating it as either sacred or hopeless. One of the film’s sharpest insights is that Angela and Joe’s constant fighting may be the last active form of intimacy available to them: they still know exactly where to wound each other because, beneath the resentment, they are still paying attention. Conversely, Piña and Hawk’s radical honesty gradually begins to look like another performance, a carefully maintained identity rather than proof of perfect freedom. The Invite refuses the easy conclusion that sexual experimentation will repair a damaged marriage, but it also rejects the idea that desire must disappear once domestic life has hardened into habit. Sometimes the most frightening proposition is not starting over with somebody else, but attempting to build a different relationship with the person who already knows all your failures.

By its final movement, the film has shifted from social embarrassment to something more wistful and humane. The ending does not provide a tidy answer, and that ambiguity is one of its strengths: the dinner may have been a catastrophe, an intervention or the beginning of a necessary transformation. Dedicated to Diane Keaton, The Invite shares something of her finest films’ ability to make neurosis, romantic confusion and middle-aged regret feel simultaneously elegant and unruly. It is occasionally stagey, sometimes too articulate for its own good, but the ensemble’s chemistry and the screenplay’s emotional precision make the evening linger after the guests have gone. Like the best invitations, it offers more than expected—and leaves behind questions that follow us home. 

The Invite 
Directed by Olivia Wilde
Written by Will McCormack, Rashida Jones
Produced by David Permut, Will McCormack; complete producing credits not publicly announced
Starring Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton
Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra
Edited by Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Ant Boys
Music by Devonté Hynes
Production companies: Permut Presentations; complete production-company credits not publicly announced
Distributed by Maverick Distribution (France), A24 (United States)
Release dates: July 10, 2026 (France), September 16, 2026 (France)
Running time: 107 minutes

Seen on 5 September 2026 at the Deauville International Centre