'The Invite' Is a Minor Miracle of a Sex Comedy

Two couples, one dinner party — that’s the bare-bones basis of The Invite, an adaptation of the 2020 Spanish movie The People Upstairs that feels tailor-made to be franchised, translated to just about any language, and transposed onto just about any upper-middle-class milieu. France, unsurprisingly, has its take on the material; so do Italy, Switzerland, and South Korea.

Now the US of A has ours, courtesy of actor-director Olivia Wilde, and thank your respective gods that we got the one we did. (The movie opens in select theaters this weekend and goes wide on July 10.) It’s an actor-driven piece, the kind that betrays its theatrical origins and keeps the action confined to a single San Francisco apartment. Yet, like its obvious predecessors (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, God of Carnage, a century’s worth of sex farces), it benefits from a savvy ensemble who know when to goose things and when to lay off the gas pedal, as well as an extremely steady hand at the helm. There’s a version of this story that goes full wink-nudge-wink, that wrings its hands so hard over relationships it removes several layers of skin, that’s too eager to make you love some characters and feel repelled by others. But here, the alchemy of all involved produces sparks instead of snark.

No one could be blamed for initially thinking The Invite had assembled its cast via Mad Libs. It’s not that every member of this quartet isn’t talented in his or her own right, but this particular mix strikes as an odd combo. You wouldn’t necessarily think that Seth Rogen’s signature heh-heh-heh stunted-bro persona would mesh with Edward Norton’s ironic take on yet another egocentric blowhard (a specialty of his, and we mean that as a high compliment). Or that Penélope Cruz’s sultry chilliness would jibe with either her male counterparts or Wilde’s diary-of-a-mad-housewife interpretation of a brittle, eager-to-impress woman brimming with creative frustration.

And yet: Like a supergroup, they sync up their own unique performance styles and find a rhythm that makes the disparate parts sound better together. It helps that the script, written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack (Celeste & Jesse Forever), lays down a foundation based on the source material, or at least solid scaffolding; the movie was workshopped during a rehearsal period with the screenwriters, who then began to incorporate discussions, digressions, and personal-anecdote detours into the end result. That sort of living-document approach helps keep The Invite from coming off as overly stagy or stodgy. You don’t feel like you’re witnessing a movie-star group therapy session in disguise, though celebrity psychotherapist Esther Perel is listed as a consultant. You simply get to sit in the corner and quietly observe a dinner party gone out of bounds.

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Which, if we’re being honest — and the spirit of The Invite demands honesty, even if it takes tequila shots, several spliff hits, and a semi-long, dark night of the soul to get there — feels doomed from the start. Our first glimpse of Joe (Rogen) is him sitting in a school auditorium, the sound of a student orchestra gingerly working their way through a piece. He’s a former musician whose band had a hit once upon a time; now he works at a conservatory and, given how Wilde frames him, eclipsed in negative space, appears to be in existential free fall. She’s not much kinder in how she films her own character, Angela, who’s flitting from task to task, constantly in manic motion. They both seem to be spinning in respective spirals. Once Joe arrives home, the bickering begins. Angela wants to know why he didn’t grab a bottle of wine for the intimate soiree they’re having in less than an hour. He wants to know what the hell she’s talking about.

Since the couple’s tween daughter (who never appears onscreen) is at a sleepover for the evening, Angela has decided to invite the upstairs neighbors over. And while she swears that she told Joe about this, the notion that he suddenly has to play host is a bit of a blindside. The shock is compounded by the fact that he has a beef with this other couple, an ex-firefighter named Hawk (Norton) and a therapist named Piña (Cruz), who are, shall we say, highly vocal about their carnal pleasures. Angela nonetheless wants to befriend them, especially Piña, who “has presence, and is so pretty.” Joe wants nothing to do with them, especially that faux-New Age “fucking weirdo” Hawk. The argument, which feels like the tip of a toxic iceberg, begins to get heated. There’s a knock at the door. Enter the guests. Let the games begin.

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It’s not that The Invite is breaking new ground, either in terms of the discreet smarm of the bourgeoisie or the idea that a spouses in a flatlining marriage might be envious of or enraged by a relationship that’s still erotically charged. The fact that Hawk and Piña have their own issues as well is not a surprise. Nor is the sudden swerve that happens when an admission of a secondary agenda from one half of this foursome is revealed. What makes this such an exhilarating watch is how the performers navigate every passive-aggressive aside, every catty comment, every choice bit of annoying behavior played for laughs, pathos, or both at once. Often, the actors are seem to be using their blurred public and screen personae — the smart-ass stoner, the brilliant if egotistical blowhard, the strong-willed Euro sex symbol — to lure you into a false sense of knowing who these characters are, only to pull out the chic designer rug from beneath your feet.

Other times, you can feel them flexing underused muscles. Norton gets a monologue that allows him to channel a unique sense of sensitivity. Rogen taps into a deep vein of hurt every time the subject of music — a symbol of failure and wasted potential — is mentioned. Cruz reminds you (as if a reminder was needed after her scorched-earth turn in Official Competition) that her comic timing can be deadly upon demand.

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But the real shock here is Wilde, who not only knows how to keep viewers on the back foot as a filmmaker but slides into a neurotic register and off-kilter comic timing for her high-strung hostess that fit her like rubber glove. She can sometimes seem like she’s wielding humor as a cudgel, as if she’s working overtime to prove that she’s not just a pretty face, a sort of semaphore version of “Hey, I’m also hilarious and contains multitudes.” (Yes! We know!) The discourse regarding her previous movie, the social thriller Don’t Worry Darling, and the distractions around her personal life didn’t exactly do her any favors, either.

The Invite should, in a perfect world, relegate that extraneous stuff to the back pages. This is easily Wilde’s best work of her career to date. Her direction here wisely emphasizes the actors, and possibly overdoes it with the mirrors — lotta symbolically reflective surfaces and isolating frames within frames — but there’s never the sensation that the person behind the camera is winging it. The way she uses simple, centralized single-person shots and creates a staccato rhythm with her cuts adds a lot to the escalation of events, the dramatic shifts, the pivots in tone. Unlike her debut, Booksmart, there’s a real sense of formalism at work here, and this update on dark relationship comedies that leave the participants wounded and weary but wiser suggests at a big leap forward. Whether this is the beginning of the hyphenate finding a distinctive voice as a director — a Wilde style — is TBD. What’s certain is that she turned a modern comedy of manners into a minor miracle.