THE INVITE
Olivia Wilde steadies the directorial ship with a solidly entertaining sex comedy
Directed by: Olivia Wilde
Starring: Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton
Released: 3 July 2026
8/10
Olivia Wilde (née Cockburn) took her stage name in tribute to Oscar, and her latest film begins with an epigram from A Woman of No Importance: “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.” Along with the starry cast, the nervy cello soundtrack courtesy of Dev Hynes and the dedication to Diane Keaton, it feels like a characteristic flourish, as though saying, in sultry M&S tones: “This isn’t just a Hollywood sex comedy… This is an elevated A24 sex comedy.”
It hardly needs the fancy packaging. The Invite is a solidly entertaining farce that steadies Wilde’s directorial career after the fiasco of Don’t Worry Darling. Wilde herself stars as Angela, an anxious stay-at-home mom with a tween daughter, a depressed husband, Joe (Seth Rogen, playing firmly to type as a grouchy noughties indie frontman turned music teacher) and a huge, inherited San Francisco apartment.
If they don’t quite have it all, they are a good way toward it, but both Angela and Joe are tormented by their upstairs neighbours, Pina (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Ed Norton). Specifically by the sound of them shagging. He is infuriated by the unholy 4am racket, but she is mostly bewildered at the idea of a middle aged woman expressing such loud and prolonged sexual pleasure.
Of course she invites them round for dinner and the film follows the evening in real time as it moves through a five-course menu, from kvetching to embarrassment to revelation, temptation and bitter recrimination. The film is faithfully adapted from Spanish director Cesc Gay’s The People Upstairs (2020), itself a kinked variation on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and takes place entirely within the apartment. It could all feel like a stagey piece of SF real estate porn - Angela has a very expensive rug habit she is only too happy to elucidate - but Wilde keeps things moving briskly, and Cruz in particular is having such fun, that even the most Rogen-intolerant will be caught up in the escalating hi-jinks.
