the invite.

The Invite. (2026)
Directed by Olivia Wilde

Hard to believe it’s almost been a year since our marriage ceremony. Like with a lot of things in our relationship, the dates don’t always line up in the sort of conventional way I expected when growing up. I got married in a courthouse ceremony in July of 2024, something done out of necessity (my fiancé lost her job and the only way to get her on my insurance plan was to accelerate the formal process). We then had our large ceremony in June the following year. In the interim, it’s been anything but boring, with a health scare, moving to the West Coast, and job changes. It’s been remarkably difficult and the strain it’s produced on our relationship is very, very real. But we’ve persevered, with the help of a couple’s therapist and the “Gottman” method, and are slowly making the best out of a tough adjustment. Watching Olivia Wilde’s The Invite. reminded me a lot of what I’ve undergone in this relationship, and even a few others in the past. Not so much a view of coming attractions or an alarmingly prescient reminder of the present, but rather a keen look at what could have been. I possess a lot of the qualities of all four of the characters that compose Wilde’s film; or rather it’s because I possess many of their characteristics that I’m able to recalibrate, thrive, and ultimately quell whatever agitation and anger that boils inside me, rather than pouring kerosene on the fire.

Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde) are a married couple with a child. Their relationship is struggling, to say the least. Joe is an unmotivated music teacher while Angela is a bored homemaker. They live in Joe’s childhood apartment, his parents long passed, and are the sort of couple that have been around each other long enough to know each other’s tics and eccentricities. Angela is preparing for a dinner party, to which Joe has no recollection of being told this was happening. His back hurts, as he lays on the floor in agony after a lengthy commute on his bike. Angela, without much concern, tells him to take off his shoes. They bicker about the night’s proceedings. Angela has invited Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña (Penélope Cruz), the two rowdy, sex-addled neighbors from upstairs for dinner. Their loud sex bleeds through the walls, leaving Joe to be annoyed, while Angela is more than impressed. Their eventual arrival is met with Joe’s clear annoyance and Angela’s overbearing need to please. Where things go from here feels fairly straightforward, with Hawk and Angela hitting things off immediately, while Piña, a sex therapist, smokes a joint with Joe in his office. This is where Wilde’s film is at its most playful, where it’s all about the flirtatious “will they, won’t they” game that sparks the eventual conversation on Hawk and Piña’s open-relationship. The nods to Mike Nichols and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are more like violent spasms than anything subtle, but it is notable how well-acted this chamber quartet can bounce off one another. The blocking and visual choreography of the space are notable, though despite being shot on 35mm, the film’s visual palette isn’t particularly robust, leaving the picture to feel very much ingrained within its stageplay roots.

Wilde’s an exceedingly interesting comic actor though, in what’s probably the biggest surprise I took from The Invite. There’s a kind of elasticity to some of her close-ups that reminded me of Jim Carrey (complimentary). It’s Seth Rogen’s casting that, while understandable, felt a bit too familiar. And while I’ve seen Edward Norton garner some citations for his performance as the retired firefighter turned carpet admirer, I would’ve been interested in a film that cast him as Joe instead. The kind of mismatch of energy still produces plenty of laughs, but like with Wilde’s previous films, Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling, are deeply indebted to filmic conventions of the past but rarely produce anything particularly insightful or new in her perspective. They’re rooted in tradition, but never interrogate beyond their surface level pleasures. And for The Invite., it starts with great promise, but truly falters in its second half to produce anything really meaningful with its ideas.

I’ve seen the spectrum that this film captures. I’ve been in a sexless relationship motivated by comforts of the familiar, resenting each other with every passing day. And I’ve been in my fair share of group sex play. I’ve been the angry, lonely, sadsack. And I’ve been the altruistic, kumbaya-espousing sex addict. I’ve tried to rationalize my misconduct through the lens of psychotherapy. And I’ve been lonely and isolated and have an internal monologue that just tells me how stupid I am. These moments of recognition within Wilde’s film are notable, arguably commendable. But observing these lived experiences in Wilde’s film doesn’t come off as true, but rather heard, like stories from a podcast or read through a Twitter thread. I’m waiting for her to pierce the epidermis and get to something real.