About The Invite

Come for the savageness, stay for the softness.

Isn’t it a great feeling when you properly enjoy a film? When I walked out of Disclosure Day I had questions; namely, how did no-one think it was worth addressing the glaring plot hole¹? It was fun, but it was also, in a number of ways that nagged like a splinter, quite stupid.

The Invite is anything but stupid. Silly at times, yes, but within the kind of carefully thought out precision that is just intensely enjoyable. I haven’t seen its source material, the Spanish film The People Upstairs (itself adapted from a play). But I assume that’s pretty good too, given it’s spurred five different localised adaptations, from Switzerland to South Korea, so far; there’s a sixth on the way.

Look: I’m easy to win over with a film that feels like a play. Festen and The Odd Couple don’t have a great deal in common tonally, but I do love both of them for dragging me into a front row seat for a close up examination of dysfunction. My friend Alex, with whom I saw The Invite, commented that it feels like a particularly slick bottle episode of a high-calibre TV show. I think that’s exactly right.

But also: I almost always loathe marriage breakdown stories. It’s the bitterness I can’t take—the almost gleeful assertion that any blissful partnership will eventually descend into a War of the Roses²-style tussle where every petty resentment turns into a festering boil. It’s hard, and cold, and claustrophobic (looking at you, Marriage Story), and if often relies on gendered caricature to make its point. The Invite even opens with an quote that suggests it might go that way: “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry”. Though given that’s Oscar Wilde, who could not have married anyone he was in love with, perhaps that already suggests more than meets the eye.

Because, thank goodness, The Invite offers more from its palette than hackneyed tropes from a strained marriage. It helps that it’s really funny; a blend of satire, snark, and slapstick that prompted plenty of cackles from across the screening room. The winning formula, though, is that it recognises the stereotypes it’s playing from—the orgasm-starved housewife, the performatively failing performer, the seductive disruptor, and the idiot guru—and plays with them without harsh judgement. It adds layers, but not in a heavy-handed way. The revelations aren’t shocking because people are predictable and stereotypes reflect common patterns; they also land with nuance, because people carry multitudes and contradictions.

It’s also a beautifully contained picture book. It uses the nooks and crannies of an unfeasibly sprawling apartment (affordable only through inheritance) to give a single setting space to breathe and pulse; they’re enclosed, bookended, but not trapped—not yet. Most of all, it plays notes of anger, exasperation, pettiness, and frustration without marinating in mean-spiritedness. That’s deft—and I think it’s what grounds the mildly outré sex comedy premise in reality.

At the core of this is a refreshing even-handedness with everyone’s awfulness. The Invite returns to what Olivia Wilde did so brilliantly in Booksmart which is to allow people to be both sympathetic and annoying in the same breath. Her own performance as frenetic, frustrated Angela—pouring her unrealised artistic ambitions into rugs and lamps and a cheese board that her grumpy husband carelessly chomps through—is in one breath relatable, and in another fucking irritating. Her transparent desire to be seen is both justified and painfully, awkwardly needy.

Meanwhile Joe—Seth Rogen Seth Rogening all over the place—finds his perfect weapon, honest brutality, disarmed by Edward Norton’s earnestly affected Hawk, who absorbs every attempt at viciousness as if Joe was firing flowers instead of arrows. Penelope Cruz’s Pina is the most high-difficulty dive, as the unnervingly attractive psychologist using loaded questions, disarming openness, and a tight top to stir the pot. But just at the point that she might tip from mildly unrealistic to distractingly so, she shows flashes of foot-stamping tantrums that crack the façade. Throughout, it’s very clear that each has walked into the room their own fully-formed story about themselves and everyone else there; they might use the same words but they’re nowhere near to having the same conversation.

If this is beginning to sound like a therapist’s playbook—a careful neutrality in the face of people talking at each other and acting childishly—that’s not an accident. At one point Pina talks about the idea of having multiple romantic relationships with the same person. It’s a common theme in the work of the internet’s favourite couples therapist, Esther Perel, who’s listed as a consultant in the credits. Both Wilde and Norton know her, and the screenplay adaptation by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones clearly draws on her themes. It’s what puts the backbone in the story, but, like Joe’s creaking middle-aged spine, it’s also where the odd spasm of weakness comes from in the form of a self-consciously didactic note here and there.

That’s splitting hairs though; I’m allergic to preachy, and it’s not that at all. The Invite is what happens when we think “that’s interesting”, and throw around an idea with friends, turning it over, coming at it from alien angles, and leaving some parts of the question open and unsettled. I seem to read and see so many things that feel like they’ve hammered together a thesis so airtight it’s suffocating. Here instead I got funny and sharp and sweet and cringe and contradictory and just really pleasingly nicely done. Up with that sort of thing.

1. He could have just dumped the whole thing online or emailed it to every journalist in the world. Yes, he’d have had to prove its provenance, but he would have to do that anyway.

2. Ironically, one of the few I actually do enjoy because it blasts past bog-standard contempt to embrace full-throated hatred, and that’s quite funny.