Complicated Realities - The Invite review

A version of this appeared in The Scotsman in July 2026.

The vicissitudes of marriage are put under the spotlight in The Invite, a savagely funny, brilliantly acted chamber piece from director/star Olivia Wilde about a bickering husband and wife navigating anxieties about sex, relationships and happiness with their progressively minded upstairs neighbours over a hastily arranged dinner party.

Wilde and Seth Rogen play the aforementioned married couple, Angela and Joe, an artistically inclined duo who’ve managed to sleep-walk their way into middle age, letting their own dreams die en route to becoming responsible grown-ups. As a former musician who never quite got over the tantalising glimpse of success he had with his band nearly two decades earlier, Joe’s now a depressed teacher at third-rate conservatoire who is so full of self-loathing he can’t bring himself to play music outside of work, which he also hates. Angela, meanwhile, is an art school graduate who’s poured herself into helicopter parenting their 12-year-old daughter to such a degree she now tries to micromanage Joe’s life too and has diverted her creative energies into obsessively remodelling the San Francisco apartment they’ve inherited from Joe’s parents.

As a couple they’re kind of awful, but relatably so, and their amusingly exaggerated neuroses and hilariously snarky put downs — the script is by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack — are frequently grounded in the quiet desperation both actors let us see bubbling away beneath the surface.

This all gets even more fraught and heightened when their ultra chilled and exotic-seeming neighbours Hawk and Piña (a perfectly cast Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz) arrive for a faux-casual dinner party that the stressed out Angela has arranged — possibly without telling Joe, who doesn’t like them for reasons of his own — in order to show off their newly finished apartment.

Thenceforth things get pretty wild and ribald in ways that shouldn’t be spoiled in a review, but for all its knockabout humour, rip-snorting laughs and sexually charged plot twists, Wilde (who previously made the excellent Booksmart and the underrated Don’t Worry Darling) guides it towards a more poignant, truthful place, one more reminiscent of New Hollywood benchmarks like Hal Ashby’s Shampoo, Paul Mazursky’s Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice and  Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge — films for grown ups that confront the complicated realities of relationships without the comforting gloss of a rom-com.