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Everyone Expected More From the Evening ‘Invite,’ Audience Included

Two San Francisco couples spend an ill-advised evening together in this tense comedy directed by Olivia Wilde.
Justin Chang, NPR
Olivia Wilde directs and stars in new comedy The Invite.

In the annals of movies about bickersome couples spending an ill-advised evening together, Olivia Wilde’s The Invite falls somewhere between two poles. No, it isn’t as good as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Mike Nichols’ scalding 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s classic play. But it’s significantly better than Carnage, Roman Polanski’s annoying 2011 film of the Yasmina Reza play God of Carnage.

All these movies have a tricky needle to thread: how do you open up a story for the screen when the story is claustrophobic by design? How do you get an audience to feel the tension and heat of marital rage without driving them toward the exit?

In the case of The Invite, Wilde and her screenwriters, Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, are working from proven material. This is a remake of a Spanish stage-to-screen adaptation, The People Upstairs, which was released in 2020. It’s already inspired remakes set in Italy, Switzerland, France and South Korea.

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In this new version, Wilde plays Angela, who lives in a San Francisco apartment with her husband, Joe, played by Seth Rogen. The film unfolds over a single evening. Their 12-year-old daughter is away at a sleepover, and Angela has invited their upstairs neighbors — Piña and her boyfriend, Hawk — over for wine and charcuterie.

The knives come out even before the guests show up. Angela is a ball of nerves, anxious to make a good impression. Joe, by contrast, couldn’t care less what they think, and he means to confront them about their very noisy sex life, which has woken Joe and Angela up at odd hours of the night.

Wilde is a terrific director of actors, herself included, and she and Rogen are all too persuasive as a long-married couple who know just how to push each other’s buttons. Rogen is especially strong; the boisterous good vibes that once powered many a Judd Apatow comedy have hardened into a shell of middle-aged discontent.

Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, eventually arrive. As the couples get to know each other, we get to know them, too, and we come to understand the roots of Joe and Angela’s unhappiness. Joe was a once-promising indie-rock artist whose career flamed out after one big hit; he now teaches music at a Bay Area conservatory, and his sense of failure is eating him alive. And Angela hasn’t made much use of her art-school degree, apart from renovating and redecorating the apartment — her sole creative outlet these days.

Piña and Hawk are a model couple by comparison, which makes them irritating and amusing in equal measure. Hawk lays on the flattery and the New Age sensitivity awfully thick, and Norton, not for the first time, expertly blurs the lines between charm and smarm.

Piña is a psychotherapist and sexologist, and at first, she might seem to veer toward a hot-blooded Euro-seductress caricature. But Cruz is too vivid to be reduced to a stereotype. Piña is ultimately the one character the movie refuses to mock; she’s too comfortable in her own skin, and too ruthlessly accurate in her assessments of Joe and Angela’s troubled marriage.

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Wilde previously directed the enjoyable teen comedy Booksmart and, less successfully, the domestic-dystopian satire Don’t Worry Darling — an ambitious movie that ultimately proved less interesting than its much-publicized behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

It was smart of Wilde to scale back with an intimate chamber piece like The Invite, though here, as in Don’t Worry Darling, her stylistic tics sometimes get the better of her. Early on, Joe and Angela’s arguments are almost drowned out by the score’s frenzied cello strings. And Wilde is a bit too fond of using the apartment’s many, many mirrors to isolate the characters visually, as if we needed reminding of how fragmented their relationship has become.

Piña and Hawk have their own ideas about how to help, and it’s worth seeing the movie yourself to discover what they are; suffice to say that the title The Invite has more than one meaning. It’s disappointing, though not surprising, that the film pulls back from those ideas. After dangling a more audacious outcome, The Invite retreats to a zone of emotional safety — one that’s poignant in its own way, though it also feels like a missed opportunity. The movie could have been — dare I say it — a little Wilder.

Copyright © 2026 NPR, Fresh Air

‘The Invite’ is in select theaters now. It will be released nationwide on July 10, 2026.

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