While everyone else was packing into VIP recliners and IMAX screens this weekend to see The Odyssey, I went a different route: Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, flying below the radar of the big releases.
It’s Wilde’s third film as director, after Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling, and the three could not be more different from each other. What ties them together is Wilde’s interest in women navigating intimate, often uncomfortable struggles that her audience tends to recognise in themselves. The Invite fits that thread perfectly, even with a man, Seth Rogen, sharing top billing.
The premise is a dinner party. Rogen and Wilde play a married couple who invite their upstairs neighbours, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, over for what starts as a normal evening and spirals somewhere else entirely. Cruz’s character is a therapist, and her observations, comparing the two couples become the film’s quiet engine, though “quiet” undersells how sharp her insights actually are.
Norton is doing something specific and very funny here. You can tell early that something is slightly off with his character, but the film takes its time revealing what. There’s a scene where the other three are locked in a heated conversation in the sitting room, forming a triangle without noticing that Norton has simply laid down on the floor behind the couch, only popping back up near the end with one perfectly timed contribution. It’s a small choice, but it’s the kind of comic patience that only works if nobody rushes to explain it.
Rogen plays a version of himself, and it works because the role needs exactly that: someone recognisably schlubby, self-deprecating, stuck. He and Wilde play a couple who both know they are stuck in their lot in life and have no clear idea how to get unstuck. That “before the epiphany” stretch is where the film does its best work. The second-hand embarrassment is real. You laugh and cringe in the same breath, often at the same line.
What makes The Invite land is that the specifics are so ordinary. Redecorating a home you can’t quite afford. Money troubles you don’t say out loud. The embarrassment of needing help from family. A job that was never the plan, holding the space where a dream used to be. None of these are dramatic on their own, but stacked together they explain exactly why a marriage starts to fray at the edges.
It’s a film for anyone who has dated or partnered through their late 30s or 40s, when the questions shift from “what do I want” to “how did I end up here, and what do I do about it.” That stretch of life doesn’t get dramatised much, and The Invite treats it with more precision than sympathy.
It definitely earns its ending.