‘The Invite’ Review: Olivia Wilde Delivers Career-Best Work With Dinner Party Orgasm

What greater inconvenience for an unhappily married couple at home than to deal with a happy couple living next door. Director and star Olivia Wilde understands this assignment perfectly and adapts to a single apartment location based on Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s exhilarating screenplay that reinterprets the Spanish film The People Upstairs by Cesc Gay. These types of pressure cooker stories have long since passed in the cinematic form, which I’ll never quite understand, as they make for a recipe for thrills, surprises, and drama. Akin to movies like 12 Angry Men, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, or bottle episodes you see in television (think The Suitcase from Mad Men or Fly from Breaking Bad). The Invite is very much in that same spirit of channelling its focus to the main couple, away from the outside world, inviting only the viewers as the spectators to a remarkable 108-minute film that flies by, with the only outsiders being the always remarkable Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton, who play the perfectly unconventional couple. Read our The Invite review below.

Starting off with Seth Rogen leaving his band class as a dissatisfied music teaching assistant who longs for some success to repair his lack of self-worth, of which the only scene is outside the apartment. We immediately see how his struggles at work transfer over to his home where he falls in agony due to his back pain with difficulties over riding his bike. His wife, Angela, played by Olivia Wilde, thrusts a sudden invitation to their neighbors to come by for dinner, much to his frustration, as she tries to convince him she brought it up yesterday, which we later find to reveal a darker side of their clearly messy relationship.

From the table with a decorated meat and cheese spread to the antique Persian rug that only obsessives would admire, Joe tries to question each of Angela’s passing choices, wondering how a dinner invite happened without his recollection, especially when he holds a strong, even passionate grudge against the neighbor couple for their loud sexual activity late at night. Something that instead turns on Angela, adding to the confusion of their dynamic, making you question how they even get along with such clear, even irreconcilable differences. The constant arguments never really go away, even with the sudden arrival of Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penelope Cruz), who disrupt the flow of our married duo, much to the audience’s joy. Revelling in such a specific set of timing and orchestrated chaos that only gets crazier as the night continues.

Rashida and Will recognise how to bring out the most in such a tightly crafted scenario by cleverly contrasting the 2 couples in pretty much every way possible. Hawk and Pina are in many ways the perfect couple, sandwiching us with the imperfections of Joe and Angela. They’re considerate, patient and both romantically and sexually inclined in ways the dysfunctional husband and wife are not. They seem to have it all figured out, which only exasperates Joe, who feels lost as his professional frustrations further reflect his personal misery, while Angela is all but confused about what she even wants. Totally unsure of herself yet so eager for perfection in whatever catches her eye.

Olivia Wilde always understood what made great storytelling if you seen her earlier work Booksmart, by placing her characters at odds with one another and bringing a cinematic brush that paints a beautiful canvas on screen, allowing for dynamic close ups and a wide array of reflective shots from mirrors to smokescreens, door knobs and window panes. It is clear that she not only learned from her previous experiences as a filmmaker but matured to adjust her style into a supremely confident vision that exudes pizzazz and composure simultaneously. the necessary mixture to accurately communicate the orgasmic chamber in this tiny apartment that feels like it will collapse any second by the sheer weight of the 4 characters going at it.

But what makes Wilde exceptional here is how she juggles the setting and tone with knife edge tension but never loses sight of her ideas that speaks to the broader pains of the universal experiences of love and happiness. It takes two to make a relationship work, Joe, Angela, Hawke and Pina all recognise this and what starts out as a clash of wills and ideas becomes a therapeutic examination of our deepest desires and what we as individuals and pairs are willing to accept and compromise for one another, and most importantly for ourselves, in the hopes of better understanding how to pursuit of meaningful connections and comfort in life. Wilde may be a craftsman on the surface but deep down she is a sentimentalist at heart and this film embodies that complexity most sincerely.

The result is that The Invite is a remarkable latest entry for Olivia Wilde who delivers her best work yet both as a director and actor, arguably giving our finest performance of 2026 already. The film is in a similar vein to Sorry, Baby and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and other great dramedies. Balancing its tone incredibly well and recognises that the best way to explore the depths of human emotions is to blend comedy and absurdity, allowing the more intimate and tender moments to reveal themselves over time as the awkwardness sets in and truth becomes more comfortable. It’s a perfect film to watch with an audience and promises great things for Wilde’s double-edged effort.

The Invite stars Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. It will be distributed by A24 and was first showcased at the Sundance Film Festival.

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