This story originally appeared on Them.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, widely seen as a coded gay film, a bickering pair of urbanites try to keep a terrible secret during a tense dinner party. Slowly, a third party — in the form of an inquisitive Jimmy Stewart — begins to unravel them.
Olivia Wilde’s masterful The Invite is kind of like straight Rope, following San Francisco couple Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde) as they try to hide the decay at the heart of their relationship from their charismatic upstairs neighbors, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton).
Except it’s not quite dinner: Joe forgot the wine, Angela burned the soufflé, and Piña is allergic to nearly all the charcuterie. Plus, it’s obvious that Joe and Angela have been fighting. The walls and ceilings are thin. So thin Joe and Angela can hear Piña and Hawk’s tantric sex noises at all hours of the night. Not that Angela would dare say anything about that. Joe on the other hand…
Look, it should be clear by now that The Invite is a comedy of manners, albeit an especially suspenseful one — and when you have great actors and an excellent script (co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, based on the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs), it’s hard to mess that up. But that only makes Wilde’s direction all the more impressive, because she refuses to let the movie run on autopilot.
Now on her third feature, following the 2020 queer-themed teen comedy Booksmart and the 2022 thriller Don’t Worry Darling, Wilde has hit her stride as a filmmaker, framing and blocking each actor with surgical precision throughout the chaotic evening. She allows the running conversation to breathe and constrict in quick succession, slowing down before tensing back up again, pairing each shift in tone with the brilliant Devonté Hynes score.
You’ll forgive me for being effusive. It’s July and the only films to really stun me in 2026 so far are 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Blue Film, and now this, a movie I wasn’t expecting to be much more than a mild Saturday diversion. Wilde has delivered something several cuts above your average “nightmare couple” movie, as The Big Picture podcast has labeled this subgenre: an affecting rumination on the place of desire in contemporary midlife. The Oscar buzz is deserved. And while I won’t spoil how the film ends in this review, if you want to know why I’m so wowed, I have to dig into some details. You’ve been warned.
Psychotherapist Piña and former firefighter Hawk aren’t just having a high volume of high-volume sex with each other; as it turns out, they’re hosting group sex parties in their apartment. Sometimes four, sometimes six, sometimes more. Joe and Angela, meanwhile, haven’t been intimate for an entire year. Angela blames it on Joe’s non-existent joie de vivre after his music career failed; Joe scapegoats what he sees as his wife’s idle neuroticism, criticizing her for channeling her energy into a home renovation — or a “renovation without change,” as Angela hilariously calls it. But of course, Angelia isn’t just trying to fix the apartment…
When Piña and Hawk extend the eponymous invite to the struggling couple, inviting them to participate in group sex, Joe and Angela light up. They want to be the kind of people who can shake off the rust and engage in some light swinging. But as they stumble through the initial awkwardness — first kisses, shared joints, bodily insecurities — their issues with each other threaten to supersede what could be a night of guilt-free polyamory. It’s hard to relax when life feels so stultifying all of the time.
Indeed, The Invite so stunning precisely because Wilde pushes it past fun summer comedy fare until the film becomes something deeper. She is concerned with a sickness many of us feel in our souls these days, especially once we pass age 40: How can we make sex feel fun and invigorating when our backs hurt, our careers didn’t turn out the way we expected them to, and everyone else seems to have figured it out but us? What keeps people together when the sheer momentum of accumulated time is no longer enough, or when it starts to breed resentment? Wilde doesn’t have the answers, but she does ask the questions again and again, probing her leads’ interiority with a pitch-perfect mix of bemusement, curiosity, and empathy.
There is a moment in The Invite that offers the closest thing to a pure escape from the malaise these characters feel: After the first group sex proposal, right before splitting up into Hawk-Angela and Joe-Piña pairings, something magic happens: Piña kisses Angela, who hungrily kisses her back. The moment was apparently improvised, as Wilde revealed in a recent podcast interview. “My mind went blank because I was so struck by this moment,” Wilde said. “I lost control. I was so madly in love with it.” (A deeply relatable reaction to an unprompted smooch from Penélope Cruz.)
To reference some of the same psychotherapy Piña dispenses throughout The Invite, the kiss feels like jouissance, a form of feminine pleasure that seems to transcend and surpass its surrounding context. It is a brief kiss — all too brief — but it is a revealing one: In a movie about a seemingly straight couple at the end of their rope, the brightest glimmer of hope is two women locking lips. Queerness may not be a way out of life’s problems, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.
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