If you’ve lived in any city, anywhere, you’ve probably had the experience of hearing your neighbors have sex. Depending on how secure you are in your own relationship, you may end up wondering if you’ve ever had an orgasm quite like the one you’re currently hearing through the walls. When was the last time my partner made love to me like that? Without only auditory aid to go off of, it can be easy to assume the grass is greener upstairs. If, like Joe and Angela (Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde, respectively), you’re already at the end of your marriage’s ropes, and you haven’t touched each other in, say, a full calendar year, the sound of sex can feel threatening. Like mockery, even. It can even be the final domino that ends your decaying partnership. Adapted by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack from the Spanish film The People Upstairs by Cesc Gay, The Invite is a magnetic, acerbically funny, romantic nightmare in the vein of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. It was never a doubt that this particular foursome of actors could keep the ball so high up in the air, but what really mesmerizes is Wilde’s crisp and meticulous direction. The Invite is like watching a game of Jenga, if the four characters were the top layer and everything beneath them was a torrent of bitterness and lies. The film may be Sundance’s best comedy of the festival, as well as its most incisive exploration of marriage and sex. At its best, it plays like a Neil Simon play or John Cassavetes’s jazzy film improvisations. It is also always stupefying. It conquers that great mountain that every film aspires to be: both inevitable and surprising at the same moment. It certainly is surprising for Joe, a music teacher at a community college in California’s East Bay, who comes home one day to find that his wife has gone completely overboard in preparation for a double-date dinner he had, seemingly, no idea was happening. The table has a massive meat and cheese board, there’s a new Persian rug, she’s wearing new clothes; Joe, meanwhile, is insistent the plan was never made. Cue a quickly escalating fight packed full of absurdly hilarious barbarisms and plain old mean jabs. Joe is pissed off at the incessant sex noises while Angela is clearly turned on by it; Joe threatens to bring it up at dinner. The bombastic fight does not end so much as (briefly) pause at the arrival of Hawk and Pina (Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz, respectively). The upstairs neighbors seem to be everything they are not: patient with each other, flirtatious, courteous. They are also romantically aggressive. It is never clear if Hawk is purposefully making sexual puns or if it just sounds like that to an already on-alert Joe. Nonetheless, the evening continues, and the mere presence of this odd but happy couple only exacerbates an already rough patch of communication for the hosts. Wilde makes the distinctly poor communication cinematic by persistently framing her characters in off-centered reflections in mirrors and window panes, or else slightly removed through door jambs and archways. Composed with a wrenching string score by Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange, this four-person chamber drama escalates in taut tension as more and more secrets are revealed, and deeper insults are flung. All of it is all the more powerful because of the labyrinth that Wilde’s direction and Hynes music creates. Characters are paired off, re-united and thrown at each other with alacrity. The apartment feels both endless and cramped.

What they learn about their upstairs neighbors, and what they learn about their hosts, continuously amplifies each character’s hang-ups, desires and agonies. Hawk’s very name seems to challenge Joe’s masculinity, which isn’t helped when he learns that he’s a former firefighter. Pina is a psychotherapist and sexologist. It’s like they’ve tapped their neighbor’s phones. Like an accordion, Joe and Angela are pulled apart and back together and apart again over and over as each conversation and each glass of wine is re-filled and each joint is re-lit. The evening is a train wreck, but, elegantly, Wilde, who also turns in one of her best performances of her career, lets the dust settle in a gorgeous and tender manner. Marriage can be wonderful; it can also be rough. It can sometimes be both at the same time. What makes The Invite ultimately so special is its unabashed honesty, even when it means doom. Like a complex symphony, it can, and should, hit all the notes.
The Invite screened at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Release Date

January 24, 2026

Runtime

108 minutes

Director

Olivia Wilde

Producers

David Permut, Ben Browning, Megan Ellison, Saul Germaine