★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
When I first encountered the revitalizing eccentricities of “The Invite” at Sundance in January, I thought, “Am I loving this embittered couples comedy so much because Hollywood has forgotten how to make them, and by that, I mean make them good?” Yes, that’s part of it. But revisiting “The Invite,” now at theaters almost everywhere, I’m convinced that director Olivia Wilde has put her own stabbing stamp on it, which means laughs delivered with a chaser of regret.
After her stunning 2019 directing debut with “Booksmart,” Wilde stumbled with “Don’t Worry Darling,” but now she’s back on her winning game. The movie’s other superpower is a hilarious homerun of a script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack that blends provocation and poignance and ranks with the best of the year.
I should make it clear right off that “The Invite” is just two couples in one San Francisco apartment for two hours. But since Wilde plays tightly wound Angela and Seth Rogen is her grumpy husband Joe, volatility is built in. Joe is antsy that Angela has invited the upstairs neighbors, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), for a night of charcuterie and wine now that their 12-year-old daughter is at a sleepover. He wrongly claims she didn’t tell him. And just as they start going at each other, in come the newbies.
Director Olivia Wilde and castmates Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz create a wicked swirl of mirth and malice that hits where it hurts.
I don’t know about you, but I kept thinking “Get the Guests,” the barbed parlor game in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Comparisons to the play and the classic Mike Nichols movie with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis and George Segal are odious but understandable and, in this case, unfair. Wilde is determined to go her own way and does so with a sneaky, snarky wit all her own.
Joe really wants to “get” Piña and Hawk because their noisy morning sex bouts spark his anger—OK, make that envy. Rogen is flying high these days with the success of “The Studio,” but this is his best and most lived-in performance yet as he catches Joe’s frustration as a one-hit indie-rock wonder now stuck teaching and feeling the humiliation of living in an apartment inherited from his parents. His intensity seems coiled to spring.
And yet these guests are hardly pushovers. Norton finds the charm and the underhandedness in Hawk, the former firefighter who swoops in ready to disarm his bickering hosts. “We love a contentious environment,” he enthuses, his cobra smile suggesting that Hawk hides layers of slithery, sinuous danger.
Best of all is Cruz, whose Madrid roots remind us that Wilde’s movie is a redo of the 2020 Spanish comedy, “The People Upstairs,” which writer-director Cesc Gay adapted from his own stage work. A newly blonde Cruz wears the role of Piña like a second skin, bubbling over with a teasing eroticism that reflects her character’s profession as a sexologist.
It’s Piña and Hawk who issue the real invite. It seems they host group-sex parties and would adore it if Angela and Joe would join in. Is this when “The Invite” turns into a snickering sex farce? In lesser hands maybe. But Wilde draws pitch-perfect performances from her castmates and herself. She also has the mad skills to create a wild ride that flies on its own comic wings without ever cheating on character for an easy laugh.
Wilde also deserves cheers for turning a single apartment into a comic war zone of verbal assaults, some drawing blood. With the vibrant help of production designer Jade Healy, editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis and cinematographer Adam Newport-Bella, she creates a wicked swirl of mirth and malice that hits where it hurts.
If there’s love here, it’s on the precipice where the toughest choices need to be made. Don’t decline this invite. These four virtuosos can nail a laugh line and then break your heart before you know what hit you. What’s not to love?