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\n Olivia Wilde directs and stars in new comedy The Invite.<\/p>\n
A24<\/p>\n
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A24<\/p>\n
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<\/a>‘ scalding 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee<\/a>‘s classic play. But it’s significantly better than Carnage<\/a>, Roman Polanski<\/a>‘s annoying 2011 film of the Yasmina Reza play God of Carnage. <\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n In the case of The Invite, Wilde and her screenwriters, Will McCormack and Rashida Jones<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n In this new version, Wilde plays Angela, who lives in a San Francisco apartment with her husband, Joe, played by Seth Rogen<\/a>. The film unfolds over a single evening. Their 12-year-old daughter is away at a sleepover, and Angela has invited their upstairs neighbors \u2014 Pi\u00f1a and her boyfriend, Hawk \u2014 over for wine and charcuterie.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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<\/a> comedy have hardened into a shell of middle-aged discontent.<\/p>\n Pi\u00f1a and Hawk, played by Pen\u00e9lope Cruz<\/a> and Edward Norton<\/a>, 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 \u2014 her sole creative outlet these days.<\/p>\n Pi\u00f1a 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. <\/p>\n Pi\u00f1a 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. Pi\u00f1a 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.<\/p>\n Wilde previously directed the enjoyable teen comedy Booksmart<\/a> and, less successfully, the domestic-dystopian satire Don’t Worry Darling<\/a> \u2014 an ambitious movie that ultimately proved less interesting than its much-publicized behind-the-scenes shenanigans. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n![\"Clockwise](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1780889293_19_.jpeg\")
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