The Invite (2026)
Olivia Wilde’s The Invite earns its squirms early and keeps finding new ones for the best part of two hours. Joe (Seth Rogen), a onetime musician now teaching band to teenagers who would clearly rather be anywhere else, comes home to discover that his wife Angela (Wilde, directing herself with more nerve than most directors would risk) has invited the neighbours upstairs for dinner. He has no memory of agreeing to this, a detail dropped in the first five minutes that tells you most of what you need to know about the state of the marriage. Upstairs live Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), a couple who operate by an entirely different rulebook, unbothered by the small daily surrenders that Joe and Angela have mistaken for a functioning partnership. The film covers one apartment and one evening, and by the end all four of them look different from how they walked in.
What I admired most, and this is the sort of thing a lesser film would have botched within the first act, is that it refuses to hand you a verdict, and it never sets up a couple to barrack for over the other. Piña and Hawk’s freedom isn’t sold to you as liberation, and Joe and Angela’s exhaustion isn’t played as failure either; both are simply strategies for getting through a life, examined with the same raised eyebrow. Managing that kind of balance in a film about marriage, infidelity and the appeal of freedom is no small trick, and in my opinion it’s the reason The Invite sits above most of the dinner-party dramas currently doing the rounds.
The opening stretch leans on its own wit a little too hard, stacking one-liner after loaded silence, and for a good ten minutes you might wonder whether the film has mistaken being clever for having something to say, an impression worth pushing past. Somewhere around the midpoint the whole thing exhales, stops performing, and starts watching its own characters, which turns out to be a far more interesting use of a camera. Cruz does the finest work of the four, finding something close to grief underneath Piña’s provocations, as though she’s spent so long insisting on her own freedom that she’s forgotten to check whether she still wants it. Norton is funny in a register I haven’t seen from him before, dry to the point of self-parody without ever tipping over into it. Rogen, for once, lets his usual amiability curdle into something sourer and more honest. None of the four try to steal the scene from the others, which, in an ensemble film with this much talent on screen, is its own small achievement.
By the time the credits roll, The Invite has earned a closing shot that says everything it needs to without a syllable of dialogue, a kind of restraint most comparable films abandon. It isn’t flawless, and that first act does wobble more than it should. But it’s a serious film dressed up as a farce, fully aware of the joke it’s playing on you, generous enough to let you in on it before the night ends. Anyone who has sat through a strained dinner party of their own will recognise this one, right down to the relief of the last goodbye.