The Invite

“The power of love… a force from above… cleaning my soul.” So sang Frankie Goes To Hollywood. A beautiful sentiment it is too. Such musings dominate music, poetry, literature and cinema. But what about when love dies? When your soul isn’t getting cleaned, but dragged through the dirt? That’s power. A rotten, bleak, creeping power, but power all the same.

This is the power that drives Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, and it is very much not a date movie. It’s more of a warning: to keep perspective, to not let the rot set in before it’s too late. Also, it’s a comedy.

Screenwriting partnership Rashida Jones and Will McCormack are behind the script — they previously wrote 2012’s divorce romcom Celeste And Jesse Forever, and here they have adapted Spanish filmmaker Cesc Gay’s 2020 film Sentimental, in which a relentlessly argumentative married couple invite their saucy upstairs neighbours in for some meat and cheese. The big plot-point arrives about halfway through; let’s just say that after a bit of wine and weed, much shit hits many fans, and there is talk of pegging.

This is a perfectly cast film. Seth Rogen is in king-schlub mode as Joe, miserable, petulant and antagonistic, a man who has zoned out of his job, his relationship, everything, reluctantly going through every single motion. Wilde plays his quite literally buttoned-up wife Angela, desperate and flailing, dreaming of having her decor appreciated. At best, they bicker; at worst they’re at each other’s throats, the endlessly petty grievances amounting to depressing discord. Their loose and liberated guests are great too, Edward Norton brilliantly smug as the seemingly enlightened Hawk, and a peroxided Penélope Cruz gloriously unfiltered and incredibly European as Pína. All four of these people are fantastically annoying. Aren’t we all?

There’s a real naturalism to the back and forths, the dynamic between everybody working wonders.

Wilde hems them all into this apartment, jamming them in some sort of psychological trial, where resentments, frustrations, fears and desires bubble up, boil over and get thrown in faces. It’s a tonal tightrope, keeping things tense and often upsetting while never forgetting that it’s a comedy — there are lots of LOLs. Here and there it is a little overcooked, the dialogue working a little too hard, and it can be zanier than necessary. Regardless, there’s a real naturalism to the back and forths, the dynamic between everybody working wonders, with much overlapping dialogue and seemingly improvised ripostes. And, vicious as it is, the light finds its way in. The film wants the best for all four of them.

It’s all too easy to get lost in life’s quagmire, and the cruelty of stagnating relationships can make for great cinema: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Before Midnight, Marriage Story. The Invite gets there too, with all its heart and soul.