There’s a scene early on in “The Invite” that solidifies the movie’s themes in an instant. This is part of what makes the film work so well – it invites you to be on its wavelength from the word go.
Angela (Olivia Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen) are shouting at each other – they’ll spend a good portion of the film shouting at each other – about whether or not they should tell their new neighbors, Pína (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) – who are coming over for dinner in just a few minutes – that they are too loud during sex, the sound of their lovemaking wafting into Angela and Joe’s extremely celibate, unsexy bedroom at night.
The film is also directed by Wilde (co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, based on the 2020 Spanish film “The People Upstairs”), and she keeps the camera incredibly claustrophobic here. So much so that you don’t really notice at first that Angela and Joe have spent the entirety of this fight making their bed. They don’t discuss it. It’s never brought up amid all the endless needling and jabs. They just start doing it. Much like making the bed, fighting has become so ingrained in their routine that Angela and Joe barely even notice when they’re doing it anymore.
With this, “The Invite” invites us into the lives of a couple so filled with resentment, so comfortable in their misery, that the arrival of a new couple who seem perfectly content threatens Angela and Joe’s hope that it’s not just them – doesn’t every married couple eventually feel this way? But a proposition from Pína and Hawk opens the door to not only a wild and crazy night, but also a chamber piece about what happens when you let resentments fester instead of treating them, and how the only person you have to blame is yourself.
Angela invited Pína and Hawk over without Joe’s approval, and his dislike for them (well, for Hawk – he at least enjoys Pína’s looks enough to tolerate her presence) is palpable from the moment they arrive. But what Wilde deftly captures here, through interesting framing and blocking that makes Angela and Joe’s winding maze of an apartment feel more suffocating than it is, is the intricate process of sussing another couple out. Angela is clearly interested in the effortlessly cool facade Pína and Hawk project (as well as the incredible orgasms she can hear Pína having every night), while Joe is suspicious of it. For their part, Pína and Hawk are trying to figure out how honest they can be about their intentions – which, to be clear, are to invite Angela and Joe to have sex with them.
This is what these four characters spend the better part of roughly an hour and 45 minutes circling around. In her direction, Wilde combines a potent mix of claustrophobia and intimacy, deploying close-ups and often framing characters in mirrors and windows during conversations, allowing us to see both parties and their reactions even when the space might not normally allow for it.
Wilde allows us to be constantly aware of each performer and their proximity to each other, and each performer takes advantage of their moment and the wittiness of McCormack and Jones’ dialogue. Those performances also come out of a stroke of great casting. As Joe, Rogen is given the opportunity to play angry – something he doesn’t often get to do – and his penchant for humor makes that anger come across sharper and more caustic. In contrast, Norton is the standard comic relief – he is, after all, playing a guy named Hawk. Cruz and Wilde also function as poles to each other, Cruz getting interesting opportunities to play with her sexuality, and Wilde playing up Angela’s neuroses with some of the funniest eye acting you’ll see in movies this year.
These opposing forces – Angela and Joe, Joe and Hawk, Pína and Angela, or any combination thereof – are all looking for something that Joe and Angela, at least, have been missing – that feeling of being desired. Pína and Hawk deploy their seductions with prowess, understanding immediately exactly what Joe and Angela are looking for (he wants a cool girl with an emotional bent, she just wants someone to tell her he likes the paint she picked out for the bedroom). But these seductions and desires open up old wounds for Angela and Joe – personal failures that, while they really have nothing to do with their partners, each has let seep into the fabric of their relationship.
Wilde guides the film through its zany humor to a quite devastating final act, one that culminates in tears and maybe the film’s most important sentiment from Joe: as Hawk attempts to engage him about his feelings, Joe berates him for the mere attempt of trying to engage Joe on a human level. That, it becomes clear, is what Angela and Joe can’t do. They’d rather sit in their anger than connect – and that’s when you know something has been lost.
