Following Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling, in actor/director Olivia Wilde’s third feature film, The Invite, she and Seth Rogen play Angela and Joe – perhaps the definition of an old married couple.
Saddled with the responsibilities of parenthood, the pair live practically on top of each other in their San Francisco apartment, with Angela seemingly renovating and redecorating the place to her liking every other day.
Joe (whose long forgotten band once had a hit back in 2008) works at a local music school, slowly losing his patience with his students, the medium and seemingly life itself, coming home miserable each night to procrastinate in his cluttered office and badger his wife with endless complaints about his bad back.
‘Can we put curtains on this window? I don’t like how they can see into our apartment.’
The film opens (in what is surely a bit of nepotism) with a quote from Oscar Wilde: that ‘One should always be in love…that is the reason one should never marry’. From afar, the pair’s story seems like a clear cut case of a couple past their time. Opportunity knocks, however, when Angela takes a long-awaited stab at socialising with someone she didn’t marry or create by inviting the prolifically noisy (for whatever reason) upstairs neighbours down for a dinner party. With daughter Maggie away at a sleepover for the night, Angela has high hopes for a bit of quality bonding time between couples; Joe, on the other hand, would just like to rest in peace (preferably forever). There’ll be little chance of that tonight, though – those pesky neighbours are about to come knocking too…
Though we briefly look in on Joe’s soul-crushing day job, we’re promptly shacked up together with the unhappy couple back in their apartment in the very next scene. Interestingly, we stay there for the entire rest of the movie – it’s a single-location picture, reminiscent of something like Rear Window in more ways than one – and yet the action never peters out in the slightest.
These simple trappings (especially apartment blocks, which seem to carry an extra bit of magic for me when it comes to setting a story there) can work really, really well if a director plays their cards right and Wilde has a delightfully deft way of using that small space in a dynamic and engaging way. I don’t quite know how she’s pulled it off, but she manages to make the place feel massive when it needs to be and yet somehow utterly claustrophobic, too.
In similar fashion to April’s The Drama, the story here really revolves around appearances and the baffling lengths that people will go to to try and look as though their lives aren’t falling apart around them in real time. Angela, seems desperate to impress – she even ordered in a whole new rug for the occasion, which is certainly more than I’ve ever done when hosting guests – and her neuroticism clashes against the upstairs couple – Hawk, played by Edward Norton, and Pína (Penélope Cruz) – and their dramatically free-spirited lifestyle.
Joe, by comparison, would much rather give the neighbours a piece of his mind (he has his own hunch as to what’s causing all that noise) but can’t quite find the gusto to do so. Rogen often looks like a man on the edge of exploding and given that we see most of the narrative through his eyes, this may well be his most sympathetic role yet – he plays the weirdness of it all very well.
We’ve all, surely, gone to the bother of planning a meet-up with relative strangers in the hopes of hitting things off and seen things go awry, and that air of awkward pretence runs heavy through the whole encounter. When Pína lists off a whole heap of undeclared allergies as Hawk sneaks off to investigate the couples’ bathroom cabinet, it all feels a bit like a really naff episode of Come Dine With Me, but that’s what makes the whole thing so funny.
Norton brings a lot of his character from Glass Onion to Hawk, channelling his energies from one genre to another to manifest in a man who never seems to shut up about chakras and chi. He nearly steals the show, but Cruz proves to be great value here, too. While she felt sidelined for long stretches of The Bride earlier this year, The Invite gives her full scope to play up the humour in her character, playing up her roots as she and Norton bicker and whisper to each other in Spanish while the other couple tie themselves into a knot trying to figure out what they’re saying. She’s a lot less concerned with auras and meditation – she often gets to the point faster than anyone else in the room – and Cruz just exudes that sense of confidence in the role, while crucially still making her feel real.
Wilde, too, accredits herself not only with the palpable sense of nervous energy that she brings to Angela but the firm hand with which she steers the ship as director. This is the first film I’ve seen from her – I know her more from projects like Tron: Legacy (where she played the wide-eyed Quorra) and her all-too-brief stint on The OC – but I was really impressed by how easily she manages to make the film’s apartment block feel like a wholly distinct world in and of itself despite the relatively mundane setting.
Gossip and whispers loom large over the story as a whole – everyone is making snap judgements and assumptions about everyone else, ducking into side rooms to confer (or argue) with their partners. When we follow Joe and Angela into a corridor – him wanting to confront the others and air his grievances; her really trying to turn the night into something it’s not, trying to wedge in a jigsaw piece that just won’t go – we voyeuristically peer into their conversation from afar.
We duck around corners or move through walls into the next room alongside them. Characters are often framed in doorways or windows, everything around them blacked out but for the light coming from inside. This could easily feel like overly-artsy window dressing chucked in to let us know this is a prestige drama, but the ‘sonder’ element at play allows us to imagine such complex scenarios as the one we’re currently observing happening all over the building and the city itself, grounding the narrative fantastically without ever distracting from the simple fun of it.
The film takes plenty of inspiration from the late Diane Keaton’s comedies of the past (a fact Wilde wears on her sleeve, lovingly dedicating the picture to her) and that influence is plain to see in the complexity of the four characters. Like I said, there’s plenty of fun to be had with everything on the surface but that’s only possible because each character (like most real people you know, hopefully) has plenty going on that they don’t shine a light on; we only see the tip of the party guest iceberg.
The Invite is, in truth, a remake of The People Upstairs, a Spanish film from 2020 that has since been adapted for other international markets in the six years since its release. That history, again, only adds to the character work – they feel theatrical in terms of their depth and the insight we’re given into their lives, but importantly, they never feel stagey or overly allegorical. The cast approach the action as naturalistically as one really can in a comedy, and the film is all the better for that.
I’d heard a lot of good things going into this one, which is always tricky because it risks skewing your expectations, but this one really did break from the crowd in terms of living up to the hype from its showing at Sundance.
It’s an incredibly well-paced ride through the baffling dance of a pre-planned first meeting that had me and the audience I saw it with laughing throughout. Unexpectedly, it also manages to build towards an ending that’s pitch perfect right to the credits, its final five minutes almost working as their own little film in their own right – like Wilde’s take on making a Pixar short. Two days on from catching it on Friday, I haven’t really been able to put it out my mind.
I wouldn’t bet on these couples meeting again but I myself have already RSVPed yes to seeing this a second time with a full cinema audience.
BBFC: Rated 15 for very strong language, strong sex references, drug misuse.
The Invite is in cinemas now.
