Appetites: "The Invite"

Olivia Wilde's new comedy The Invite extends a long tradition of what we might call dinner-party cinema, where the key ingredients are these: a sprinkling of actors, honed to sharp but hopefully still representative points; a single, well-furnished location; a sense of a tumultuous, finally rather testing or trying evening; barbed or otherwise polished dialogue, ideally trialled in a stage setting. Mix them as you would a pre-dinner cocktail, and you end up with the kind of would-be sophisticated entertainment guests can chew over at real-world soirées: think 1967's lodestone Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Woody Allen's gossipy Husbands and Wives, the French smash Le dîner de cons, Polanski's insufferable Carnage. Adapted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from a Spanish play-turned-film (known locally as Sentimental and internationally as The Couple Upstairs) which has already been reworked in multiple languages, Wilde's film operates primarily as a study in radically different energies. Representing exhausted middle age: Seth Rogen (Fozzie Bear playing Oscar the Grouch, sore of back, sorer still of spirit) and Wilde herself (status-anxious, overly committed to the fate of a soufflé) as frazzled parents who see a late supper with their upstairs neighbours as a rare chance to reposition themselves as vibrant social butterflies. Gliding into this married couple's recently refurbished space: sexologist Penélope Cruz and her firefighter beau Edward Norton, who may just be everything their hosts dream of being, namely cosmopolitan (they speak Spanish!), childless, audibly passionate in their lovemaking (Wilde has warned Rogen not to complain), cool as cucumbers, and stylishly attractive in their upward mobility. The guests arrive bearing cheesecake that melts in the mouth and a proposal, indecent or otherwise, which will determine just how close our leads want to get to what these outsiders have. An alternative title floats into view: Guess Who's Coming After Dinner.

By all trustworthy reports, Wilde's previous film as director, 2022's much-hyped Don't Worry Darling, had its virtues and selling points, but its narrative chicanery got out of hand. The controlled chaos of her new project, by contrast, provides welcome reassurance that today's filmmakers haven't entirely abandoned the playbook their predecessors passed down. Wilde has found an excellent script, cast the hell out of it (perfectly, indeed), and then endeavoured not to mess up what was set on the page. Here's an overdue return for a cinema that finds ordinary people, with all their hang-ups and insecurities, fascinating; between them, McCormack, Jones and Wilde set up a tasty tag-team encounter between a couple who possibly care too much what other people think and another who have longstanding reasons for not giving a hoot. As a director, Wilde busies herself tracking shifts in energy. This night starts off cranky and awkward, as Rogen and Wilde row and the former eyes Norton from a suspicious distance; it starts to feel more convivial, as the couples split into mutually reinforcing groups of two (Rogen/Cruz, Wilde/Norton); secrets and confidences are shared, bombshells dropped; and then it all starts to get a little too much for some of the participants. Wilde wards off any residual staginess in the text by giving the couples' interactions a borderline manic antsiness, that demonstrated by folks who've been let off the leash for a night: the filmmaking has its own playful, curious, sometimes outright fruity energy, heightened only further by a mischievous Devonté Hynes score, determined to fill any gaps that it can. But Wilde also organises all this conversation intelligently: once the initial small talk is set aside, this foursome get deeper and deeper into it - until at least a couple of them realise they may have got in too deep.

A smart screenplay is one thing, but The Invite also has actors capable of improvising over the top of it for added value; once everyone's taken their seats, we're getting a symphony of people rubbing one another up the wrong way (and finding that they secretly enjoy the sensation). That Rogen has been getting the most glowing notices may partly be down to his status as the underdog in this heavyweight cast, the actor with the most to prove (despite a largely agreeable two-decade career). But his Joe is also the character who has the most to respond to: set on edge by Norton's glibness, irritated by Wilde's urge to suck up to these outsiders, at once startled, aroused and terrified by Cruz's forwardness, he's the one person in this room whom you sense would rather back out and go solo with some weed. (Which may well be the right call, all told.) Yet Wilde, turning cartwheels while hyperventilating, is almost as funny in passing, and though Norton possibly sounds too New Agey to fully convince as a fireman, he also gets a line I don't think I was expecting to hear in a mainstream film in 2026 ("Nobody in America can afford anything these days"). Towards the end, the material's roots begin to show: after all its interpersonal carnage, The Invite offers the conventional closure of a middlebrow stageplay, paying lip service to the idea that what the Rogen-Wilde pairing really needs isn't carnal knowledge but in-person couples' counselling. We're sat down too long; the laughter rate and pulse dips. Yet what comes before it really is stimulating and cheering: a fun night at the movies, a revival of the old-school farce with skill, craft and a progressive, feminist, sex-positive viewpoint (more European than American, finally), and a most effective corrective to a prevailing movie trend. The Invite is what The Drama might have been, if our comedies were still being made by grown-ups with real lives and not sniggering trolls: for once, a talking-point movie actually merits some positive talking about.

The Invite is now showing in cinemas nationwide.