‘The Invite’ review: Olivia Wilde directs and stars in glossy, tense dinner party drama

Dir: Olivia Wilde. US. 2025. 107mins

From Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? to Carnage, cinema has no shortage of stories about dysfunctional couples going to war with each other. Now comes The Invite, an uneven comedy-drama that ultimately has something fresh to say about sex, love and commitment. Olivia Wilde’s third feature stars her alongside Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton as the combatants who eschew fake pleasantries in order to get candid and catty. The film struggles to juggle its combination of rage and humour, satire and sadness, but the game performances mostly help gloss over the material’s familiarity.

 Game performances mostly help gloss over the material’s familiarity

The Invite debuts at Sundance, and this adaptation of Spanish filmmaker Cesc Gay’s 2020 feature Sentimental (which was itself a remake of his stage play) would seem to be ideally suited for sophisticated date-night crowds. All taking place in an impressive San Francisco apartment, the picture boasts major names trading barbs and sexual innuendoes and is likely to follow in the theatrical footsteps of Wilde’s previous directorial works Booksmart ($25m worldwide) and Don’t Worry Darling ($88m).

Angela (Wilde) is anxious about the fact that her upstairs neighbours Pina (Cruz) and Hawk (Norton) are coming over for wine and cheese. She very much wants to impress this couple, whom she doesn’t know well but considers stylish and cool, while her cranky husband Joe is angry that she didn’t tell him about these plans until minutes before their arrival. (He has another reason to be annoyed: lately, Pina and Hawk have been making loud, passionate love in the middle of the night, keeping him awake.) When Pina and Hawk arrive they sense that Angela and Joe have been fighting, starting the evening off on an awkward note.

Those familiar with Sentimental will be familiar with the twist in store for Angela and Joe, but the less one knows the better. Pina and Hawk are, indeed, cool, occasionally speaking to each other in Spanish and carrying themselves with an air of superiority. (The passive-aggressive way in which Pina explains that she will not be eating any of the food Angela has prepared is merely the opening salvo in an evening full of veiled attacks.) Hawk haughtily talks about the importance of radical honesty, practically challenging Joe to own up to the resentment he’s trying to suppress. Plus, Pina announces that she’s a sexologist, which only underlines the sense that she’s in a vibrant relationship – which the sexless, feuding, long-married Angela and Joe are not.

Wilde recruits cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra and production designer Jade Healy to give Angela and Joe’s apartment a look that is both glamorous and claustrophobic. Often shooting the actors through mirrors or in hallways to emphasise the tenseness of the evening, the director drapes the proceedings in a deceptively classy veneer befitting these upscale couples’ presumably highbrow conversations about life, fate and regret. Obviously, that veneer proves to be a feint once Joe starts rudely insulting the pretentious Hawk — ”seriously, what kind of name is Hawk?” — while Angela desperately tries to keep the night from derailing.

Cruz and Norton are especially good as this hifalutin couple who eventually admit that, yes, they do enjoy vigorous sex — although they have an explanation that will surprise Angela and Joe. The two actors have an amusingly self-satisfied rapport, and Norton makes Hawk contemptibly enlightened and sensitive while Cruz cannily plays on her sex appeal to stir envy in both Angela and Joe.

Rogen and Wilde have the tougher task as the more ’normal’ couple — essentially, serving as surrogates for the audience as we wonder if Pina and Hawk really are too good to be true. Although Rogen plays The Invite’s funniest character, the screenplay from Will McCormack and Rashida Jones sometimes strains for its humour, leaving the actor to fall back on his trademark tics. That said, when the film turns more serious, Rogen acquits himself nicely portraying a miserable music teacher who long ago internalised a belief that he is a failure.

As the insecure Angela, Wilde can be a bit wobbly when negotiating the picture’s more outrageous comedic moments, but her character soon emerges as the story’s emotional centre. Viewers will learn that Angela’s fixation on this couple has deep roots, and Pina and Hawk’s happy sex life triggers something unfulfilled in herself that emerges over the evening.

Ultimately, The Invite has a showy, frequently glib theatricality that undercuts the harsh realities embedded in the script’s arguments and quips. As a director, however, Wilde keeps returning to an idea that proves pretty potent: Angela and Joe think they have issues with Pina and Hawk, but their actual problems are with themselves.