THE INVITE
2026
Directed by Olivia Wilde
Written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones (based on the movie Sentimental by Cesc Gay)
I could be accused—I would welcome the accusation—of being a much bigger-than-average fan of Olivia Wilde's career as a director, which hasn't been the smoothest sailing for her, kicking off with the sleeper hit (though it made a much bigger impact on commentators than actual audiences) of Booksmart in 2019, before being immediately mired in the production debacle and media circus of 2022's Don't Worry Darling, which was received poorly before it was even released, received even less well after it was, and potentially earned its modest profit out of the same instinct that compels rubbernecking at a car wreck. I thereby come by my status as a bigger-than-average fan on the basis of liking Booksmart pretty well and thinking Don't Worry Darling had an aesthetic x-factor that found me deeming it "acceptable" despite Wilde's apparent ability to tolerate, potentially even her inability to recognize, one of the most severely broken screenplays in a major motion picture in recent memory. I have suggested that Wilde maybe ought not be the dominant producer of her own movies; that, at a minimum, it'd be nice if next time she got herself a good screenplay. Well, the first thing was probably unavoidable after Don't Worry Darling, and we find that Wilde fell in as a replacement director for a preexisting project that producer David Permut had been trying and failing to put together—this being today's subject, The Invite—while, for the second thing, she didn't need to worry all that much this time about a good screenplay, or at least a screenplay with stable and properly-formed bones, and not because writers Will McCormack and Rashida Jones had come up with one for her, though let's stake that their screenplay is quite fine. But it's an adaptation of something already proven to have worked, The Invite being a remake of Cesc Gay's Sentimental, a big Spanish hit in 2021.
Now, I realize that sounds kind of... bad. There's a negative spin to it, anyway, that one could fall into: that Wilde, in the paradoxical position of her highest-grossing movie (which it still is) being perceived as an abject failure, rebounding, but only by jobbing on some exploitative English-language remake of a successful foreign film, such as Permut had hoped to churn out even earlier (as noted, Wilde didn't even start with the project, and Permut had already burned through married directorial duo Jonathan Davis and Valerie Faris), which also leaves Wilde's directorial body of work an exceptionally fragmented and arguably even impersonal thing, inasmuch as I don't imagine you'd be able to tell that the 90s-style high school comedy, the 70s-style sci-fi mindbender, or the 60s-style marriage dramedy were generated by the same filmmaker. At a minimum, it poses some challenges to anybody who's been trying to tell you, these last seven years, "trust me, bro, Olivia Wilde's good."
Then again, we can take a more positive angle: for one, it's cool to discover that a new filmmaker these days can do different things, beyond the thing that they made their name with (Damien Chazelle is one of the few "they make me excited" talents of the current era doing so; compare, meanwhile, Robert Eggers or Boots Riley or Damien Leone or Makoto Shinkai*), and Wilde, having now tried her hand at three wildly divergent films has, by my lights, at least succeeded as an able creator of images and emotions in three completely different genres. Armed with a genuinely strong screenplay for once, it follows that it's Wilde's first movie that I love. The love does come with caveats: I'm eventually going to have to take a big shit on one aspect of its visual construction that Wilde has to be held ultimately accountable for, and there are certain oddnesses to the movie besides; but if you just want the executive summary, what we've got is an inveiglingly well-made movie about marriage that isn't boring, and doesn't come off much like a remake, either, both in the energy at play, and in the sense that its screenplay at least feels like it's been rebuilt from the ground up, rather the original film being used as an exact blueprint. So I should also mention what seems to me like a significant mitigating factor: we can scowl at the idea remaking a foreign-language film—we've certainly been trained to—but Sentimental has become its own whole weird little phenomenon of world cinema, having been remade already, four times, in new localized versions for Italy, Switzerland, France, and, really spreading its tendrils far and wide, South Korea; so we might just have to say that "remaking it in your own highly-specified cultural idiom" is simply what one does with this movie, which makes sense if you've seen The Invite, even if the American remake addles this idea a bit, I'm not sure all that intentionally.
The hook of the Sentimental microgenre, as you know, is this: what if your neighbors, hotter than neighbors usually are—visually congruent with movie actors, no less—came over one day and suggested a gangbang? Though it shouldn't surprise you, since it's playing in a theater where they look unfavorably on you jacking off, that the hook isn't the point. But to offer the details this time, let us consider our... well, I hope "stand-ins" is too far. Instead, let us say our protagonistic normies: Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (with the original slate of actors having scattered to the winds, Wilde recalled, "hey, hold on, I am also an actor**"), parents to a never-seen twelve year old, the former a bitter failure overshadowed by his own inheritance—principally the cavern of an apartment they live in, in San Francisco—and increasingly wretched that his musical career reached no further than one-hit wonderdom, his aspirations having congealed into what he perceives as the mediocrity of teaching, and the latter a stay-at-home mom with a kid who isn't all that often at home, who had some nebulous artistic dreams herself but presently fills her life with repeated attempts at interior design. A few months ago, they got new neighbors, Piña (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), a psychotherapist and ex-fireman firefighter (a runner that works better than I reckon it looks) respectively, whom they have mostly ignored, out of genuine disdain in Joe's case and the inertia of isolation in Angela's. But this has become more difficult as their neighbors' sex lives have expanded exponentially and increased in decibel level to the point that Joe and Angela don't need to imagine what either of them sound like cumming, though in point of fact they'll turn out to have misidentified the source of the loudest noises, because they have never been, actually, very imaginative people. In any case, overhearing all this sex has not been pleasant for them, because, as will be later revealed to Piña and Hawk, although we've already figured it out, Joe and Angela don't fuck—they probably have at some point since conceiving their child, but not much.
Joe comes home one evening from a long day in the music mines (and in a great introductory shot, not the first image of the movie, but I believe the first entirely-parsable image, we meet Rogen bereft in the Phantom Zone that Wilde's made out the geometrical tiling of his conservatory's empty auditorium seats), exhausted from boredom and from being an out-of-shape, lumbago-afflicted Elder Millennial who's somehow been cajoled into riding a tiny fold-up bike, to learn for what Angela is insistent is not the first time (it turns out to have been the first time and the charitable interpretation is she's lying) that she's invited Piña and Hawk over for the kind of dinner you'd normally plan some days in advance. (A plot hole, if you like, or if not hole, then plot curiosity, that suggests this movie wasn't rebuilt from the ground up—because presumably Sentimental's Joe wasn't a commuter cycling behind Frank Bullitt all afternoon—is that Joe doesn't smell bad, or suspect he could smell bad, which will turn out to be something he'd probably consider.) This leads to an argument, that Angela wins by default, and though Joe is unwelcoming and Angela is weird (for while Joe is resentful of this couple he doesn't know, Angela has oppositionally invented an admiration for them), their pointier edges are softened by their guests' charm—Hawk, for instance, continually notes how much he appreciates Joe's honest hostility—and when the subject of noise is broached, the neighbors admit that they and their friends have been a little rude, and furthermore, they haven't been too neighborly themselves, having failed to invite Joe and Angela to join their fun, an omission they correct tonight.
It is, then, your old-fashioned, comparatively-low-concept comedy, and while I've probably given away how much of a comedy it is by the way I've described its character dynamics, it is funny, and beneficiary of good comic acting all around without anybody, even and indeed especially Rogen, resorting wholly to shtick (it raises the question of what would've happened if he'd swapped with Paul Dano on The Fabelmans, and I like the answer). It is, anyway, a swell ensemble with everyone doing good or even great work, Cruz and Norton in particular doing the fairly unintuitive work of reining in a pair who would've been easy to turn into lunging stereotypes, all without completely abandoning the classical fun you'd feel cheated out of if you didn't get at least some stereotype, Norton a little more than Cruz in pursuing the harmless sleaze of "Hawk" (the name comes up in dialogue, rest assured) with his open and immediate boundary-testing with Angela and Joe alike. But both are at the business of the kind of pixieish whimsy that they keep surprisingly likeable, even if you'd probably wonder if you wanted to hang out with them too much after the gangbang.***
But they're the inciting incident, not the show, and you win no points for guessing how readily and totally this shades into drama, the premise being much less about how to give a bored couple a sexual resuscitation than it is about how a pair of essentially-supernatural beings/dramaturgical constructs have inflicted themselves upon Joe and Angela. (This isn't quite literal, but one of the cleverest things the movie ever does is acknowledge that you might well have facetiously asked, "so are Tyler Durden and Sofia Serrano there actually real?") Regardless, they've clearly arrived with the mission to either shake loose Joe and Angela's marital problems, so they can be addressed, or else to destroy their marriage and put them out of their substantial misery. The show, then, is Wilde and Rogen themselves, taking turns being the most awful person and merely a regular awful person, in pursuit of The Invite's increasingly-not-so-hilarious ambitions towards old-fashioned psychodrama, about how people let marriages silently rot away from underneath them, justifying the film-starting epigram from the director's great-great-granduncle Oscar. (That said, the laughs never disappear, so while maybe they're uncomfortable laughs from the jump anyway, one of the bigger ones coming the film's last third, that goes altogether unstressed, is that our heroes are so infectiously unpleasant that they've begun contaminating the sex angels' own relationship, setting them to objectlessly sniping at one another.)
I've said old-fashioned a couple times, and it's one of the big unbalancing things about the movie, even if I can't quite tell if it's good or bad. I also said "60s-style marriage dramedy" (I don't approve of the comparisons you frequently see to Virginia Woolf, principally because I don't approve of Virginia Woolf, and this movie's about the way human beings fail at sexuality and love), though I could've said 70s-style as easily. But it feels most of the very-early 80s, when the 70s hadn't quite subsided yet, and some filmmakers were still trying to keep movies about the petty problems of married middle-aged adults alive; though it's not just subject matter. It's not just visuals, either, although Adam Newport-Berra's 35mm photography has revived for 2026 the kind of drab brownness for this tasteful mausoleum of a marriage that tells you what these filmmakers have been most inspired by. Some of it is the, shall we say, "success mode" of the same approach driving Disclosure Day, where the characters feel a little more unplugged from and unreflective upon their own genre than they probably should be, which is more psychologically credible in a marriage story than it is in a movie about UFOs where nobody knows what a UFO is ("I heard about double penetrations on a podcast" is pretty close to a verbatim line here, but she does know, even if I'm not convinced this speaks to the awareness of "porn tropes"—that is a verbatim line—of anyone born in 1984, let alone someone born in 1984 who married an up-and-coming rock star, and has probably had conversations regarding such things), but all told, it does afford it some measure of the pseudo-timelessness I think it's going for. On the other hand, it is still a mite out-of-touch in things to the side of its main thrust, too, for example it does not seem to realize that Joe is not the well-off scion of well-off parents, but a ridiculously wealthy failson (it is deeply unclear why Joe, Bay Area land baron, would need to work at a job he despises), as well the vague sense that psychotherapy is intended as a hip and novel phenomenon; and you do wonder, a bit, how much of this is the development work done under its previous senior citizen directors (McCormack and Jones being the project's one constant), whose turn-of-the-80s touchstones were lived experience, rather than a filmmaker younger than I am, merely attracted to those touchstones.
A director could leave this a dull actors' affair—an actor-turned-director might be even more tempted—and Wilde doesn't, starting off with the excitingly brash gesture of an okay-some-of-those-touchstones-are-the-60s split-screen collage under the opening credits, a good one, that I'm only disappointed doesn't ever come back, though it does tend to prefigure the way she's going to be using inlaid frames to get the most a dramedy could get out of the visually-isolating possibilities of a weird U-shaped apartment where you can look into the apartment from the apartment (and also watch Olivia Wilde walk around naked—sorry, this is mainly theoretical—from the upstairs apartment). Moreover, Wilde is exceedingly good about dropping lonely singles into the proceedings of an ensemble dramedy that also tends to have the kind of thought-through blocking that isn't so common these days, and the thing snaps, racing through its scenario in a way that makes it slightly enervating even before it's properly started, partly thanks to Devonte Hynes's loopy, jazzy, and overtly-thrown-back score, and the movie never feels as long as it is, which at 107 minutes isn't indulgent. (The crazy headspace Wilde is putting into some compositions isn't unobjectionable, but it's good at reminding you what frightened losers her protagonists are; the trailer was cut like a horror movie, not for no reason.) And then there's whatever the fuck is happening with the actual camera operation, Newport-Berra, or somebody, whom Wilde didn't take in hand very early on to tell them that in this movie that she's designed to have feverish overlapping dialogue—assholes constantly talking over each other—that brainlessly racking the focus to the current dialogue source is going to be a quixotic struggle at best and a monstrous distraction at worst. So I couldn't tell you how a movie with good, interesting blocking and frames-within-frames wasn't conceived with deeper focus in mind as part of its core identity, except 1)it's 2026 and 2)late in the day, Wilde deploys some shallow focus exceedingly well, with an absurdly wonderful shot of Rogen looming like a sad slasher villain in the negative space behind her, and instead of talking, or touching her, turning around and receding into the even-fuzzier haze dimension behind him.
But I guess it is, still, mostly a movie about its actors, which is no sin. I'm also very impressed by Wilde direction of Wilde, to the extent it could be her best performance, and I'm at least second-guessing my impulse to call Rogen first-amongst-equals when Wilde's "being-aware-of-her-own-brittleness-and-derangement-just-makes-her-more-brittle-and-deranged" take on Angela is like watching someone walking into traffic without looking. My favorite thing, I think, is Rogen's relief at finding out it's orgies, visibly relaxing in a way that it might be pitifully obvious even to the characters how much insecurity he's put into in those world-shaking orgasms from above, without guessing on his character's behalf that this still probably isn't the correct way to think about his wife's lack of orgasms (or his own); or maybe my favorite thing is that Angela never disclosed the particular logistics of how she met Joe, an exasperatingly sweet story she apparently was too embarrassed to tell him, and, like I said, they take their turns. A sad movie all around, then, but not an apocalyptic or hateful one, which is the danger; just as important, it's even a deliriously fun one, at least up until it really needs to get serious; and it has a lovely last shot.
Score: 8/10
*Or, including new hotnesses who don't excite me at all, Jordan Peele or Zach Cregger or Sean Baker or Gints Zilbalodis.
**Arguably not an actor of as much objective "note" as Amy Adams, whom she replaced, but I, personally, wouldn't have seen Wilde as anything like a downgrade, and it wouldn't even enter my mind to trade out the performance she gives.
***I was astonished to learn that Paul Rudd, in the original cast, played Joe rather than Hawk. Anyway, in a movie where typeage is definitely being used, but maybe with some quibbles otherwise (at least Wilde plays her intimidation by Cruz's "prett[iness]" more as bi-curiosity than insecurity), it's partly why I tend towards Rogen, to whom middle-age has been unusually good but can bring out the feeling of being haunted by schlubbery, as the ensemble's best player.
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