Couples Counseling

 We hand out our first straight A to a feature film in 2026, and only our second straight A overall. 

THE INVITE (A) - Every so often a movie is so good that it feels rude to write about it and reduce it to standard two-dimensional criticism. Here we have four people, one setting and a juicy script, all corralled with manic skill by director Olivia Wilde, who also sandblasts the screen with a memorable performance.

 

Wilde plays Angela, a hornet's nest of anxieties who lives with under-achieving musician Joe (Seth Rogan) and spends most of her tedious days decorating the San Francisco apartment they inherited from his parents. The latest crisis in their tense relationship is the impending arrival of their neighbors for dinner, not long after Joe has slogged home on his collapsible bicycle across the hilly city from his dead-end job as a college music teacher.

Pina and Hawk, the neighbors, are on Joe's shit list, because they have loud sex, often. (As you might expect, Joe and Angela, who have a tween daughter, don't have a intimacy to flaunt like that.) Angela is desperate to impress the neighbors and to offer her own mea culpa for the noise generated by their recent apartment renovation. She tosses a souffle into the oven, splays out some cheese and jamon, and insists on opening a rare bottle of wine they had been saving for a special occasion.

Pina (a bleach-blond Penelope Cruz), a therapist, swans into the room with swagger and skepticism. Her partner is Hawk (Edward Norton), a touchy-feely kind-bro who -- upon entering the apartment where Angela and Joe had obviously just been fighting -- announces to the room, "It's OK. We love a contentious environment." Rogan's Joe has a field day mocking the other couple's whole New Age vibe (if "New Age" could be said to encompass a lifestyle that involves open marriages and orgies). Cruz lends gravitas as the educated voice of reason; Pina is genuinely appalled that her neighbors are squandering their life together by smothering the pleasure out of it. 

 

This simple yet combustible set-up is arranged by screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack (remaking a script by Spanish writer Cesc Gay). They stuff this powderkeg with enough dry powder to demolish the entire building complex in one take. It is imbued with both high-stakes emotion and razor-sharp comedy by Wilde, whose facial reactions range from horrified to ecstatic, sometimes in the same breath. 

The proceedings take off when it becomes apparent that Pina and Hawk have designs on Joe and Angela, eager to initiate them into the world of spouse-swapping and group sex. What follows is about as believable a depiction of such a situation as you could hope for in a movie. At first, Angela and Joe are super-curious, asking all kinds of questions about the logistics and mechanics of marital hook-up culture. In a fascinating insight into her character, Angela instinctively throws out the phrase DP (double-penetration), betraying a deep-seated hunger to explore and probably a decent history of watching porn during her relationship drought. 

To say that Wilde stands out here is high praise, because Rogen is wonderful as he goes way beyond his usual smart-ass banter; Cruz gives a master class in restraint; and Norton digs deep into the psyche of a well-drawn (and annoying) character. Besides an opening montage with incidental extras, the only actors are these four, and it would be difficult to imagine any other actor subbing in for any one of them. You don't get ensemble performances (let along within a modern chamber drama) at this level. "The Invite" makes a classic like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" look stagey. It makes Mike Nichols' "Closer" seem forced.

Instead, this is Wilde's masterpiece, a welcome recovery from her universally panned previous effort, 2022's "Don't Worry Darling" and a leap in style from her fine debut, "Booksmart."  Jones and McCormack (like Wilde known more as actors) teamed up in 2012 for a more uneven look at a relationship, "Celeste & Jesse Forever." They almost certainly were assisted here by extensive work-shopping and improvising by the cast, but the one-liners (sometimes rapid-fire during overlapping dialogue) are precise and insightful. The bawdiness can be belligerent. When Pina and Hawk reveal that one of their shared lovers is an older woman, but they don't know her age, Joe advises them, "Next time you're in there, count the rings." Joe can't believe Hawk used to be a firefighter, because firefighters are brawny and have mustaches. (He's not entirely incorrect.)

My favorite scene might be a quiet one between Angela and Hawk, who shows an interest in her decor, especially the rugs. Angela shows him three huge paint swatches on a wall, and Hawk analyzes the three virtually indistinguishable shades of blue-green deeply before landing on the choice that she'd hoped he would. When she tells him that Joe -- like most of us -- considered the colors to be essentially the same, Hawk intones earnestly, "Is he colorblind?" 

That's an example of why writing about the movie feels pointless. It's hard to convey why that last line is so funny. You have to invest in the film and sync with its rhythms, settle in with the characters. You'll either buy it (and what do I know; I've never been invited to have group sex) or you won't from the start. (I have experienced a "contentious environment" or two during marriages.) I could pick a couple of nits here -- there is the cliche of the unplayed instrument in the house shunned by the failed musician; Pina's turn against Hawk at one point feels a little contrived -- but I went to see this a second time and appreciated it even more.

Perhaps the third time will be a charm.

BONUS TRACKS

Wilde charges out of the gates confidently in the opening scenes with this dollop of faux '60s Britpop, "I'm Confessin'" by Fabienne Delsol from 2007:

 

And over the closing credits, the demo for "Our House," where Joni Mitchell joins Graham Nash: