Oh, for the times when you’d see the hordes outside a cinema of a Saturday night – couples and singletons all in the same ‘pot’, sharing an experience.
Way back when, the queue for The Invite would’ve stretched right around the corner.
A proper grown-up comedy with brio and bite, it marks a terrific return to form for Booksmart director Olivia Wilde – the Irish American double-jobbing here as one of the four impeccable leads – after 2022’s widely panned Don’t Worry Darling.
This is one of the films of the year, no question.
Wilde and Seth Rogen play Angela and Joe, a San Francisco couple who have lost sight of what they mean to each other in the fog of life.
A proper grown-up comedy with brio and bite
Desperate for a timeout from nightly antagonism, Angela asks new neighbours Pína (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) over for food and wine – much to Joe’s displeasure.
It turns out that among the many things that make Joe angry is the amount of noise that Pína and Hawk make in the small hours, and despite Angela’s warnings, he intends to raise the issue the minute they’re in the door.
Pína and Hawk have something they want to talk about too…
This is a bawdy farce that guarantees belly laughs, but there’s also insight and heart in between the gags
It can’t be stressed enough: you don’t want to watch The Invite with polite company in a cinema, an experience that will recall the 1980s VHS-driven terror of needing to stick the kettle on or check the immersion. A remake of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs (Sentimental), this is a bawdy farce that guarantees belly laughs, but there’s also insight and heart in between the gags, and the joy of watching a story that zips from one scene to the next can’t be overstated.
On the acting front, all four stars deliver career highlights. Wilde’s perma-anxiety is someone you definitely know; Norton revels in gnomic pomposity; Cruz’s charisma scorches the screen, and Rogen delivers one of the most accurate depictions of the male psyche since Paul Giamatti in Sideways. Giamatti, shockingly, missed out on an Oscar nomination for that performance, but fate may be kinder to Rogen in January when The Invite’s tally is revealed.
(L-R) Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton attend the Los Angeles premiere of The Invite at DGA Theatre on 24 June, 2026 in Los Angeles
Although a gear change near the end feels jerky and Pína and Hawk bow out abruptly, The Invite more than lives up to Hawk’s early assertion that “You’re in for a treat…”
How the other half love, indeed.