MOVIE REVIEW: The Invite

Images courtesy of A24.

THE INVITE— 5 STARS

Troubled marriages and broken relationships have been a prime target for a staggering range of both comedy and drama at the movies for as long as the medium’s been spinning. One of the trickiest aspects in submitting those types of couples is how close to the fine, toxic lines—or far across them—the filmmakers and storytellers are willing to go to still make a redeemable experience for the viewer. Preying on the dry kindling of marriage dissatisfaction with a volatile spark of unexplored sexual fascination, The Invite balances that precarious presentation with a cunning rarely seen in such films.

The Invite opens on a married San Francisco couple, Joe and Angela (Four-time Emmy Award winner Seth Rogen and the director Olivia Wilde), preparing for a dinner party with their upstairs building neighbors at two different speeds of enthusiasm. Angela, the stay-at-home mother, found a sleepover babysitter for her daughter and has been cleaning, prepping, and cooking up a storm. Joe, lumbering home from his work as a music teacher by way of a fold-up bike on the unforgiving hills of The City by the Bay, supposedly forgot to pick up wine and is beat. She wants everything perfect to impress their guests, and he feels like this unwanted party was sprung on him. She’s frantically trying to find the right outfit, and he’s lazily eating the charcuterie cheese early. 

LESSON #1: HOW SATISFIED ARE YOU IN YOUR MARRIAGE?— Angela and Joe couldn’t be farther apart, and a shouting match of argumentative volleys—delivered and edited faster than a Wimbledon tennis match and ending on the practically begged line of “Not tonight, please”—typifies where they stand, giving us the first clear hints of marital dissatisfaction. If you go by the available broad polling statistics, the number of Americans who describe their marriage as very happy dropped seven percentage points from 1973 to 2024 to 61%, spanning the booming era of high divorce rates and shifting dating behaviors. Watching these spouses argue room-to-room throughout their apartment all the way up until, and after, the doorbell announcing the arriving neighbors, happiness sounds past tense. You wonder where the love is and, quite possibly, when the last time was they shared it.

Turning up The Invite’s stovetop temperature, a big sticking point stuck in Joe’s craw during the argument about bringing over the neighbors, is the standing issue of the extremely loud lovemaking noises they often hear from them upstairs, something Angela clearly admires more than deplores. Gnashing their teeth and opening the door, enter Hawk and Pina, the apparent source of those guttural sounds and a couple ten years their senior, played by Academy Award nominee Edward Norton and Academy Award winner Penelope Cruz. Sprinting through the pleasantries and churning smokestacks of put-on flattery, the mood in the room settles on Hawk’s smiling assertion of “We love a contentious environment.”

LESSON #2: MESHING DIFFERENT VIBES— Speaking of mood, this extended encounter of snappy conversations in The Invite fluctuates in fits and spurts based on whether the vibes and attitudes of the discussion topics mesh across the four gathered adults. This is where The Invite’s decorated ensemble shines with sterling character work. Olivia Wilde channels scintillating stress, begging for relief while Seth Rogen’s exasperated and witty-as-hell reactionary muttering zings with gut-busting humor. Meanwhile, Edward Norton uncorks alluring charisma not seen in years to feign amiable compassion next to Penelope Cruz’s masterful control of posture and body language to always tilt and turn heads. The merges and clashes are unpredictable, anchored again by another line from Hawk of “I love how honest you are about what you’re feeling.”

That barrier of bracing uprightness becomes the ultimate crux of The Inside, a remake of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish comedy Sentimental scripted by the Celeste and Jesse Forever duo of Oscar winner Will McCormack and Rashida Jones. The first sidebar split that shuffles the couples creates a few bonding clicks that lift the dinner from the aforementioned contentious environment, aided greatly by the sly camerawork from Emmy-winning cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra of bouncing watchful angles off mirrors and framing interactions through various architectural edges. Angela sought this get-together out, and Pina and Hawk accepted it because they had something… *ahem*… inclusive they wanted to talk about. It’s a jaw-dropping surprise that the trailer dangles but doesn’t reveal (so neither will I). 

LESSON #3: THE DEFINITION AND GOAL OF COMPERSION— The snap of honesty—starting with Seth’s Joe—bursts a dam of questions and sought-after sordid details where judgments dissolve away. In tiptoeing around the intriguing divulgence in question of The Invite, one can say, as Pina does, that it boils down to the notion of compersion, which, at face value, is the opposite of jealousy. Following another spoken axiom of “People forget they deserve more,” getting to compersion requires a healthy space and clarity for both curiosity and communication.

LESSON #4: HOW IS THE OPENNESS OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP?— As The Invite swirls in the temptations of each new intrigue presenting itself for the two couples, all of the “what would you do” thoughts begin to flutter and center on measuring the openness of one’s companionship. Comfort and understanding levels vary greatly. Whose idea is whose, followed by all of the verbalized reasons of why or why not, go with it. Sustainability arm-wrestles jealousy and blame. Within this quartet, who will crack first and in what direction? How does the swerve massage the marital strife and misery that opened the film? Do minds change, or when does regret or guilt come into play?

And you are a voyeuristic fly-on-the-wall for all of it! How much you entertain wild propositions, spiked by dramatic drops of the orchestrational cues by Queen & Slim and Passing composer Devonté “Blood Orange” Hynes, will match your engagement with The Invite. Compare your kinks and compare your calamity to theirs as the cross-examinations skirt the existential as well as the suggestive. This all feels like a brisk game and a bold test, and there is unmistakable brilliance to take away from such an experience, and witnessing the savvy theatrical chops, led by Olivia Wilde, it took to pull this kind of vampy subterfuge.

LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1408)