I take notes during movies. Sometimes I fill up pages and pages; sometimes I write just a couple of sentences. During Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, I wrote three lines. Here is what I wrote:
- “A delightful domestic nightmare.”
- “Olivia Wilde’s Jason Sudeikis revenge movie?”
- “This is much better than Olivia Wilde’s last movie.”
Wilde’s last movie was Don’t Worry Darling, a thriller about an eerily perfect 1950s community. Starring Florence Pugh and Harry Styles, it garnered way more headlines about Wilde’s supposed conflict with her female lead than anything onscreen. (“None of that has any bearing on my feelings about this project,” I wrote about it back in 2022. “Troubled productions sometimes produce masterpieces, and harmonious sets sometimes produce garbage. A film is not how it’s made; it’s how it plays. And Don’t Worry Darling plays very poorly.”)
But Wilde’s first film was the terrific Booksmart; a small but well-observed comedy about high school kids. The Invite returns Wilde to that territory in terms of tone and scale, and also sheer overall quality. As far as story and setting go, it’s her simplest film yet; four people in one apartment for about 100 minutes. But it never feels like an adapted play — even though it was inspired by a Spanish film titled The People Upstairs that was, in turn, based on a stage show. Instead, strong camerawork and four terrific stars, including Wilde herself, produce an hour and a half of, well, a delightful domestic nightmare.
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It begins when Wilde’s character, Angela, invites her upstairs neighbors Pina (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton — yes, his character goes by Hawk) for a dinner party. Angela‘s husband Joe (Seth Rogen) returns home from a hard day at his job at a music conservatory none too happy to learn he has to put on a smile and entertain guests — especially Pina and Hawk from upstairs who, we soon learn, engage in ear-shattering sexual intercourse on a regular basis. It’s clear from their body language and the way they talk that Angela and Joe haven’t had sex — any sex, much less ear-shattering sex — in a very long time.
The party gets off to a rocky start; Joe forgot to get wine, Pina doesn’t eat any of the food Angela bought for dinner. Joe wants to confront the other couple over their boisterous lovemaking; Angela keeps redirecting the conversation to any other topic. Eventually, though, the noise (and the copious copulation) comes up. And with it comes far more details about Pina and Hawk’s love life than Angela and Joe expected — along with an offer to join them in a polyamorous tryst, perhaps even that very night.
At a Q&A following the screening of The Invite I attended, Wilde cited the films of Mike Nichols as the main influence on her approach to this material. There’s certainly a fair amount of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in here, and maybe a dash or two of Carnal Knowledge as well. But The Invite also feels like its own thing, largely because the four leads deliver such distinctive performances — and, in the case of Norton and Cruz, their funniest and sharpest work on camera in quite a few years. They manage to keep the audience guessing about Hawk and Pina’s motives, and they keep bringing enough new dimensions to their characters. Pina and Hawk seem so smarmy and obnoxious when they first walk into Joe and Angela’s apartment, but later scenes significantly complicate both of their backgrounds, and our attitudes toward them.
That’s true of Joe and Angela and their relationship as well, which has grown stale and resentful. Rogen and Wilde make a very convincing couple, with very believable middle-aged hangups and issues. But Wilde is also a sensitive enough filmmaker to spread the blame between them, and to find humanity in both characters — and in Hawk and Pina as well.
The Invite is a real return to form for Wilde, signaling that Booksmart, not Don’t Worry Darling, was the real template for her directing career. Not that she can’t or shouldn’t make bigger films with more elaborate special effects, but she seems to have channeled her own experience in front of the camera into a real facility working with other actors, and intimate movies like this one really let her show that talent off.
Oh and to answer my own question: I do think this is probably Olivia Wilde’s Jason Sudeikis revenge movie. And a pretty good one, at that.
RATING: 8/10
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