The Invite: Couples Therapy with Witnesses and Bad Table Manners

Joe does not want visitors. Angela has invited the upstairs neighbors anyway. It’s a terrible starting point for a pleasant evening and a pretty good one for a comedy. Olivia Wilde plays Angela herself, Seth Rogen is Joe, and Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton get the pleasure of being guests at a couple’s dinner party when they should have had the conversation before setting the table.

I feel about the perfect host couple the way I feel about a LinkedIn post about a fantastic workplace: the more effort goes into convincing me, the more I want to hear from the person who isn’t saying anything. A dinner table is a tiny, efficient press office. You can sell your version of the relationship while the other person sits there passing the salad.

Joe, your disappointment does not pay the rent

Joe is stuck in a musical dream that never became what he had hoped. Moovy’s Kristian Enevoldsen highlights Rogen’s physical performance and the character’s sense of loss. That is an important opening into the man. I want to understand him. I just do not want to give him the whole apartment to be disappointed in.

The failed male artist enjoys an impressive line of credit in culture. Bad moods can pass for depth for years without anyone asking for documentation. I’m not buying it on installment. Joe is allowed to grieve the life he did not get. He just still has to be someone you can live with. A lost career should not grant a lifetime right to be unbearable.

That is why Angela gets my sympathy first. After all, she is trying to make something happen. On the other hand, it is quite something to choose an untested soufflé and charcuterie for a vegan when the evening is already under strain. I would have started with pasta. It rarely has to confirm your worth as a human being.

But Angela does not get a moral Michelin star for cooking. I like her determination to make something happen; I have a harder time with the idea that the other person therefore owes her a cheerful performance. If the recipe for a successful evening requires your partner to adopt a new personality, the problem probably is not the soufflé. Care becomes suffocating when it comes with a job description.

It works both ways. He can use his disappointment as an excuse to check out; she can turn her composure into an accusation. Then you end up with two people, each with a perfectly reasonable explanation, and they are completely impossible to be around. That conflict has more bite than yet another story about a couple who just need to learn to communicate. They are already communicating. Quite violently, in fact.

An open relationship is not a personality test

The upstairs neighbors, Pina and Hawk, have arranged their love differently. In Soundvenue’s interview, Norton describes their relationship as non-monogamous and without ownership. Wilde points to the difficulty of talking about sex with the person you are actually having it with. That last part interests me more than the number of possible participants.

I have nothing against people designing their sex lives creatively. But I check out if openness becomes yet another lifestyle you have to perform correctly. You do not automatically become generous because you are in an open relationship. You can also be a self-absorbed idiot with a very flexible calendar. Conversely, fidelity is not a seal of quality if you spend the rest of the relationship making the other person feel small.

So I am not crowning the upstairs neighbors winners in advance. Their freedom is most interesting as a provocation: what if some of what Joe and Angela call normal is simply something they have stopped discussing? That is a question worth the trouble. It does not require anyone to sign up for group sex. Maybe it only requires listening to a desire without immediately demanding an apology.

I want the conflict to mess with my own sense of fairness too. Angela is easy to defend when Joe fills the room with disappointment. It is harder to ask whether her version of the good evening leaves him any room at all. That is where the premise touches something I cannot just nod wisely at. A film that only confirms who is annoying could just as well be my group chat.

I want the bad line too

A chamber piece has to do more than take a position on marriage. Four famous actors in an apartment can also turn into a long evening of expensive faces. Time Out’s Phil de Semlyen praises the way the camera and the actors’ positioning distribute attention. That is the formal argument I care about: the reaction has to have room beside the line. Otherwise the film just rewards whoever is quickest in the room.

And I have reservations about the very well-written conflict. Soundvenue’s Luna Ehlers points to an abundance of punchlines and a few forced serious points; de Semlyen also finds the late shift toward seriousness uneven. That weighs against my research-based assessment. I want room for a stupid remark that is not rescued by the script. People in crisis are not always entertaining. Nor should they have to be in order to deserve attention.

Four stars. Do the dishes yourself

My verdict is four out of six stars. The contained format and the conflict over who gets to be the reasonable one give The Invite a strong idea. My reservations about the density of the dialogue and the move toward seriousness keep me from calling it unreservedly successful.

I would choose it for an evening when there should be something to disagree about afterward. Not as a test of whether your own relationship is modern enough. I have no interest in that competition. I would rather discuss why it is so tempting to have strangers think you are a good partner when the person you are actually with is close to giving up.

The guests have to go home eventually. And someone is still left with the dishes.

The Invite (2026). Directed by: Olivia Wilde. Screenplay: Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. Cast: Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. Running time: 107 minutes. Danish theatrical release: 13 August 2026. Film information at Kino.