THE INVITE Review

Olivia Wilde invites four people to a dinner party and somehow makes you feel like you were also there, slightly drunk, increasingly uncomfortable, and absolutely unable to leave. The Invite is one of those films that knows exactly what it is doing from the first frame and executes it with such confidence that you stop trying to predict where it is going and just give in already. Which, fittingly, is also what the characters eventually have to do.

Seth Rogen plays Joe, a former indie musician turned bitter academic who has elevated complaining into something approaching performance art. He bickers with his wife Angela, played by Wilde herself, about pickles, rugs, fold up bicycles, wine he forgot to buy, and approximately seventeen other things before their neighbours even ring the doorbell. These two fight the way some couples breathe, constantly, reflexively, not even fully aware they are doing it. It is exhausting and completely recognizable and if you have ever been in a long relationship you will spend parts of this film staring at the screen with the haunted expression of someone being shown evidence.

Then Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton walk in and detonate the whole evening. Cruz is a Spanish psychotherapist and sexologist radiating the kind of serene erotic confidence that makes everyone around her immediately recalibrate their entire self image. Norton plays her partner as a sort of Californian guru type who is so genuinely warm and non threatening that you keep waiting for the catch, and the catch, when it arrives, is so perfectly constructed that I actually laughed out loud at my own surprise. These two are swingers. Enlightened, New Age, enthusiastically communal swingers. And they would like to extend an invitation.

What is remarkable is what Wilde does with this premise, which in lesser hands would become either farce or therapy session. She plays it as neither. The film sits in this extraordinary uncomfortable middle space where everything is funny and nothing is a joke, where people are being nakedly honest and still somehow lying, where a dinner party about whether four strangers should have an orgy becomes, without any warning, genuinely moving.

The script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack crackles with overlapping dialogue that sounds exactly like how real people talk when they are trying to say one thing and meaning another.

All four performances are staggering, Rogen has never been this raw. Wilde has never been this good. Norton makes you laugh and then breaks your heart in the same monologue. And Cruz, playing the catalyst of the whole glorious mess, is operating on a frequency the rest of us can only observe from a respectful distance.

The Invite is the best film about a dinner party I have seen in years, which sounds like faint praise and is absolutely not meant to be.

🍿 SCORE = 91/100