The Invite

How many of you reading this actually know your neighbors? I’d say I’m lucky—I’ve got some pretty good ones—but even then, I only know of them, not really them. Maybe you don’t need to be best friends, but there’s something to be said for at least knowing who lives next door and what kind of people they are.

In Olivia Wilde’s new film, The Invite, that idea becomes the entire premise: a couple invites their neighbors over for dinner, and the way the night unfolds might completely change how they see each other—and what “being neighborly” really means.

Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde) are a married couple, with Joe working as a music professor while Angela stays at home. After a long day, Joe comes home to discover that Angela has invited their neighbors, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and her partner Hawk (Edward Norton), over for dinner—without giving him much of a heads-up.

Not exactly ideal timing, but the guests are already on their way, so Joe has no choice but to roll with it.

Once they arrive, the usual apartment tour and polite small talk begin, though things are immediately awkward—mostly thanks to Joe. The four of them try to find their footing, testing boundaries and feeling each other out. Eventually, Joe begins to loosen up, helped along by a few unexpected factors, and the conversation starts drifting into places no one quite anticipated.

The question becomes: where does the night actually go from here? And the answer is—anyone’s guess, as both couples begin to uncover truths about their partners and themselves that can’t easily be ignored.

Written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, adapted from Cesc Gay’s The People Upstairs, the film builds its foundation on patterns of conflict within long-term relationships. McCormack and Jones lean into the way couples use familiarity—and sometimes vulnerability—as a weapon, where even casual comments can escalate into emotional flashpoints.

They easily could have leaned into cliché territory, but instead they give us layered characters who feel real, awkward, and at times downright uncomfortable to sit with. The script especially shines in its first half, where confessional moments and nervous behavior drive much of the tension.

The Invite ultimately delivers a claustrophobic, sharply observed look at the slow unraveling—or evolution—of long-term relationships. Wilde does an excellent job balancing the humor of a dinner party gone wrong with the emotional stagnation that can exist inside a marriage.

What’s interesting is that the film opens with a pointed Oscar Wilde quote about the fragility of marriage, but by the end—through humor and melancholy—it lands somewhere far more hopeful and human than that opening suggests.

The cast is what truly makes it work. For much of the film, it feels like they’re carrying the weight of the storytelling choices themselves, and they rise to the occasion with a finely tuned ensemble performance.

The Invite reminds us that some of the biggest conflicts can happen in the smallest of rooms. It’s refreshing to see an adult, dialogue-driven comedy that’s this consistently engaging. It will make you cringe at times, laugh at others, and occasionally cause you to question yourself.

At its core, it becomes a surprisingly insightful study of relationships and the secrets we keep—placing you in a kind of observational space that feels like people-watching at its most entertaining.

Brian Taylor

Member of the North Texas Film Critics Association, and lover of all things Cinema