Something Exceptional

When you go to a dinner party, you never quite know what to expect. One thing is promised, but the night can take unexpected turns — menu-wise, people-wise, conversation-wise, or otherwise.

In other words, when it comes to dinner parties, you should always expect the unexpected.

Such is the case with Olivia Wilde’s excellent new film, The Invite, which follows that kind of scenario.

Adapted from Cesc Gay’s Spanish film The People Upstairs (Els veïns de dalt), with a screenplay by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, The Invite centers on Angela and Joe (Wilde and Seth Rogen), a long-married couple whose relationship is falling apart. Tensions are already high between them when they decide (or, rather, they feel pressured) to host their mysterious upstairs neighbors, Pina and Hawk (Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton), for a dinner party. 

I don’t want to say too much about the specifics of the plot beyond that, lest I spoil any of its surprises, but suffice it to say, what begins as an awkward evening quickly escalates into something far more intense. As the night unfolds, the two couples engage in increasingly personal and provocative conversations, exposing resentments, insecurities, and hidden desires. Hawk and Pina introduce ideas and behaviors that push Joe and Angela far outside their comfort zone — especially around sex, relationships, and honesty — turning the dinner into a kind of emotional and psychological battleground.

On paper, The Invite sounds deceptively simple: four people, one dinner, a handful of secrets that refuse to stay buried. But Wilde and her screenwriters clearly had something a bit more profound in mind. Together, they’ve delivered a film that isn’t just Wilde’s best work to date — it’s one of the most insightful and entertaining movies of the year so far.

The Invite feels both tightly constructed and completely alive. The film was shot in order, all in a single location (a soundstage, but still), so there’s a real theatricality at work here that aligns it with the source material. (For the record, Gay’s film was based on his own stage play, Los Vecinos de Arriba). That said, Jones and McCormack inject their script with a distinctly modern bite. Their screenplay is witty and observant, and it dissects relationships with a real edge.

Because that’s really what the film is doing: cutting into the dynamics of couples with surgical precision. The film is less interested in whether relationships work than in why people stay in them at all. Is it habit? Fear? Love? Some complicated, ever-shifting combination of all three? The movie doesn’t pretend to have clean answers, but it keeps circling the question in ways that feel uncomfortably honest.

And yet, for all that insight, this film is funny — sharply, sometimes brutally so. Jones and McCormack have a gift for dialogue that feels both hyper-articulate and totally natural, the kind of back-and-forth where a single line can land as a joke, a jab, and a confession all at once. You’ll laugh, a lot, but usually there’s a sting attached.

All four actors are excellent, navigating tonal shifts that swing from flirtation to hostility to vulnerability in a matter of seconds. There’s a lived-in quality to these performances that makes the film’s central question — why do we stay? — feel less like a philosophical exercise and more like something uncomfortably personal.

Wilde also leans into the awkwardness of intimacy in a way that feels refreshingly unpolished. The film is undeniably sexy, but it’s the kind of sexiness rooted in tension, miscommunication, and the constant push-pull of desire and doubt. It understands that relationships aren’t just built on passion or compatibility, but on a thousand tiny decisions to overlook, forgive, or simply endure.

What lingers most, though, is the film’s emotional undercurrent. Beneath the humor and sharp observations is something quietly heartbreaking about the way people hold onto each other — even when they’re not entirely sure why they’re doing so.

The Invite is smart, provocative, and disarmingly perceptive. It’s the kind of movie that makes you laugh, wince, and then sit with what it’s actually saying long after the credits roll.

This is one invite you should definitely say “yes” to.

I’m giving the film an A.