By Matthew Moorcroft

Highest Recommendation

• Directed by Olivia Wilde
• Starring Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton
• R

An awkward and consistently insightful sex comedy about the perils of relationships and marriage, The Invite immediately has an air of tension right as Seth Rogen’s Joe enters the home. With a bad back, a miserable outlook on his job, and a proclivity to mask his own insecurities with humor rather then actual sincerity, the bickering starts as soon as Olivia Wilde’s Angela begins talking and asking about whether or not Joe brought the wine home. Unsurprisingly, he has not, and the naturally neurotic and anxious Angela is trying to make sure everything is perfect the guests they have coming over – something Joe forgot about. Or maybe Angela just didn’t tell him. It’s hard to say with the amount of secrets already buried under the surface here.

That tension is finely tuned to comedic perfection right away, and once the other couple arrives – a brilliant duet of Edward Norton’s and Penélope Cruz’s Hawke and Pina – things begin to unravel almost right away. It would be a comedy of slapstick errors if it also wasn’t so obviously relatable and real in how it handles the dysfunctional nature of all relationships and marriages; a certain point, every one looks kind of weird to somebody else so might as well not think about it too much.

But while The Invite could have so easily fallen into simple, junevile declarations about sex and intimacy that many of these kinds of pictures have fallen into, there is a maturity and subdued approach that Olivia Wilde – also the director on the picture in what is easily her best effort yet from a pure technical standpoint – manages to maintain here. Instead of finding the farce, Wilde hones on the real human complexities that would arise in a situation like this. All four members of the cast have differing, unique perspectives arising from different life experiences and feelings, and those all clash, intersect, and find common ground throughout multiple points in the one location narrative.

It’s easy for something like this to become stagey as well, and while The Invite could certainly work as a play (it itself is a remake of a film that was once a play) there is a cinematic nature to how the film unfolds itself. It’s music is finely tuned, the editing is pitch perfect, and Wilde finds new and exciting ways to keep the layout of the actual apartment interesting to the eye. Much of this is in Wilde’s blocking, which gives sequences where all four of the players are in frame and it tells you everything you need to know within half a second of looking. Characters will fall in and out of frame so effortlessly that it feels like a trick of the eye. Everything is calculated, and yet it’s still as naturalistic and seemingly improvised as possible.

That naturalistic script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, who have experience in these kinds of stories before, is exactly why The Invite is so effective. It’s just a crackling, quotable, immensely entertaining piece of writing that manages to always be hilarious first and foremost which disguises it’s heartbreaker of a gut punch in the third act. The highlight of this is the elongated middle section of the flick where the four cast members frankly discuss sex in a way that’s both refreshingly honest while also leaning into the uncomfortability some have with the topic head on as a way to deconstruct certain biases. It’s an exceptional sequence, one that also has some of the strongest laughs in a picture that has some truly incredible laughs.

And then once that third act hits, with true feelings laid bare and an inpromptu psych session that gives our two couples a little bit of a reckoning, those switched gears into sentimentalism and heartache really work due to the humanistic filmmaking at the core here. It has no answers for any of the questions that are brought up here, but many of those questions simply cannot have answers for they speak to truths about human nature and the way we interact with the people we care about deeply. For several, The Invite will be equally as moving as it is revelatory, but for others it could hit so close to home that it turns from wordy comedy to a deeply tragic drama about two miserable people stuck in a marriage of convenience.

It’s a rather old school film in that sense, less concerned with grandiose statements about humanity or overly flashy camera movements and filmmaking. Instead, The Invite lands as a wonderfully classical feeling film, one that makes you remember that cinema isn’t just for the big epics or sold out horror phenomenons. Easily one of the year’s biggest surprises, and one of it’s best.