After succumbing to the sophomore slump a few years ago with the dreadfully dull psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling (2022), Olivia Wilde has reaffirmed herself as a phenomenally talented filmmaker with her third feature, The Invite. It is as astute a dissection of long-term relationships as this year’s The Drama was of the honeymoon phase. Wilde stars as an anxious woman named Angela, who secretly invites her new neighbours for a casual get-together in a naked attempt to impress them. However, she neglects to run this by her husband Joe, a failed musician-turned-teacher played by Seth Rogen.
He isn’t into it one bit. Joe has an axe to grind against the neighbours, because their love-making has kept him awake for weeks. He doesn’t know whether to be angry or jealous, but he most certainly isn’t going to be rolling out the red carpet for them. Played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, the neighbours are the perfect foils to utterly bored Angela and Joe. Even before the chic couple from next door arrives, the two are at each other’s throats about everything from back posture to charcuterie boards.
Stage set
The Invite unfolds entirely inside Angela and Joe’s newly refurbished apartment, which borders on the tastefully curated and maniacally overthought. In the first few minutes, Wilde is able to communicate exactly where Angela and Joe are in their relationship without having to rely on clunky exposition. The limited space also gives her an opportunity to display how skilled she is at staging.
Often, primarily in the first act, Angela and Joe are framed with heaps of negative space separating them. This distance appears to become smaller as the film goes on, but even when they’re sitting next to each other, Wilde makes the smart decision to keep one of them out of focus. There is simply no way, her camera seems to be saying, that these two can be on the same page.
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The neighbours, Pina and Hawk, are in an altogether healthier space. They have their problems like every other couple, but unlike Angela and Joe, they refuse to forget why they got together in the first place. Plus, as a third-act twist reveals, they’ve kept the spark alive with regular entertainment. It would be rude to reveal what this twist is, and if you haven’t watched the trailer or the Spanish original on which The Invite is based, you might want to keep an eye out for spoilers. The revelation comes at around the hour mark, but instead of kicking the movie into a different gear, it brings the proceedings to an unexpected halt.
The preceding hour is quite glorious; all four leads are dialled in, their chemistry is crackling, and some scenes are so cringe-inducing that you might be transported back to a family gathering you were forced to attend. At its peak, The Invite is so good that you can’t help but be reminded of two similar chamber pieces from different eras — the Mike Nichols classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which a middle-aged couple invites younger counterparts for a similar late-night get-together, and the explicitly cancelled Roman Polanski’s Carnage, a comedy of errors in which two sets of parents convene a meeting after their children get into a tiff at the park. There are also farcical shades of the Hindi film Bheja Fry.
In the act
The Invite’s biggest strength, unsurprisingly, is its performances. One false note would have sent the entire house of cards crumbling, but Wilde is able to extract stellar work from herself and her three co-stars. Each of them could have come across as a caricature — Pina the sex freak, Hawk the pretentious charlatan, Joe the bitter slacker, and Angela the controlling shrew. But the script, by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, is able to extend empathy to each of them. Everyone is struggling in their own way, The Invite says in some of its sappier sequences. But most people prefer keeping their guards up.
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It’s unfortunate, then, that the third act can’t match the energy of the preceding hour. It’s not that the movie trades humour for sentimentality, but it’s almost as if the script abruptly runs out of funny observations.
For around 60 minutes, the movie seemed to be deeply tickled by how people behave when they’re by themselves versus when they have company. But the final stretch puts all four characters in a scenario which is extremely far-fetched.
The Invite is more intelligent than the average relationship comedy and Wilde couldn’t have done a better job both as an actor and director, but the script needed perhaps one last polish before it was turned in.
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