‘The Invite’ Review: Who’s Afraid of Olivia Wilde? [A] | Sundance

Romantic partnerships are rife with stories to tell and emotions to explore. This is why there are endless movies about them. People longing for love, finding love, losing it, moving on from it. More than 100 years of cinematic relationships make it challenging to stand out and say something fresh. But this is just what Olivia Wilde achieves with her new film, The Invite, her first as a filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival, premiering for a packed Eccles Theater on Saturday night.

Wilde made her directorial debut with the acclaimed high school coming-of-age comedy Booksmart, in which she took all of the raucous, raunchy silliness of teen comedies normally centered on boys and examined similar themes through the lens of awkward teenage girls. Her follow up, Don’t Worry Darling, a mid-century styled, Stepford Wives-esque psychological thriller was less enthusiastically received. But now she is back with her third film; her smartest, wittiest, most grounded to date, an adaptation of Cesc Gay’s Spanish film, Sentimental. 

Our story opens with the sounds and images and videos of a happy couple enjoying their life together. Fabienne DelSol’s “I’m Confessin’ (That I’m in Love)” provides the soundtrack to their naivete, oblivious to the idea that this romance could one day fade. Then, emblazoned across the screen are the words of Oscar Wilde. “One should always be in love,” we read. “That is why one should never marry.” 

We immediately jump to lonely, depressed, isolated Joe (Seth Rogen), sitting in an auditorium where he can think of nothing he wants to say to his eager students. Joe teaches at a San Francisco music conservatory, a fact that would impress plenty of people, but which Joe considers one of his life’s many failures. After all, it isn’t Berkeley. At the end of the day, he pulls out his foldable bike, a contraption he clearly hates, and begins the torturous ride up San Francisco’s hilly streets. 

Joe’s difficult ride (during which he eventually gives up and walks the bike the rest of the way home) is cut together in montage with images of his wife Angela, played by the director herself. In stark contrast to her husband, Angela seems content as she goes about her day, stopping at the deli, selecting a new rug, arranging flowers. But we soon learn that this curated vision is wholly incorrect. Instead, she is an overly-caffeinated people pleaser who is every bit as lonely and isolated as the man she shares her life with. These opening few minutes are the only time we see Joe and Angela physically separated, but when he arrives home the emotional chasm that keeps them apart is immediately apparent. Fighting is their only form of communication these days, and it starts the moment he walks through the door.

The initial argument between Joe and Angela is all too familiar for anyone who has been in a long-term relationship and is the first glimpse of both the brilliance of the screenplay co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, and the strength of Rogen’s and Wilde’s performances as the volume gradually increases and each attempts to talk over the other, lobbing the insults that can only come from many years under the same roof. The catalyst of this evening’s fight is the dinner party she arranged with the upstairs neighbors, an invitation she insists she told him about yesterday. He has no memory of such a conversation and just wants to eat pickles off the charcuterie board and lie on the floor while complaining about his chronic back pain. The scene is funny exactly because it is so familiar and relatable and gives us what we need to know about who Joe and Angela have become as a couple and as individuals. 

The upstairs neighbors are Pina (Penélope Cruz), a psychologist and sexologist, and Hawk (Edward Norton), a retired fire fighter. The sophisticated and enigmatic pair know they have arrived in the middle of an argument — Joe has just declared he is going to tell their guests that their very boisterous and enthusiastic sex is keeping him awake at night, Angela angrily pleading with him not to ruin the woman’s enviable orgasms. Pina and Hawk confess to hearing them fight and immediately offer to reschedule, though Hawk can’t help but comment on the oft-promised, long-delayed invitation. He is a man who enjoys the truth. He tells Joe early on, “That’s what I like about you,” and he means it. But Angela, who poured all of the day’s energy into making this dinner party look casually thrown together, insists they stay. Everything is fine, she says with a wave of her hand. “We love a contentious environment,” says Joe with a grimace.

The Invite is a film that depends on a strong, equally yoked dynamic between its four leads and this quartet could not be more perfectly assembled. The four stars have amassed a collection of Oscars, Emmys, and Actor Awards among them, their expert improvisational skills, an excellent script that Wilde confirmed in the post-film Q&A was filmed in order, and a lot of rehearsal time to develop their chemistry make long stretches of dialogue feel like natural conversation. Rogen is his usual, affably curmudgeon self, but with a world-weary despair and a touch of self-loathing. Wilde imbues Angela with a frantic craving for validation and healthy attention. Her performance here could not be more opposite the take-charge BDSM artist in her other 2026 Sundance movie, I Want Your Sex, an intriguing double feature to showcase her often overlooked range. As Pina, Cruz is sexy and confident, her sophistication instilling seen-it-all wisdom in the woman from upstairs. And Norton reliably plays Hawk with the kind of confidence that can only come from suffering through tragedy and coming out on the other side with an entirely new outlook. In a late scene, he tells a story so powerful and heartbreaking, we can’t help but watch with reverent awe.

Together, the four stars invite us into their intimate evening spent entirely in an apartment constructed on a sound stage by production designer Jade Healey. The apartment itself is the fifth character in the ensemble, a place where space and distance are palpable, windows can both reveal and conceal secrets, and we gain deeper insight into the home’s inhabitants. 

At first, there is the awkward banter of neighbors who barely speak in the elevator. Joe is uncomfortable and Hawk too at ease. Angela caustically attempts to hush her husband while he openly mocks her shopping habits and insists that Hawk could not possibly have been a firefighter because he isn’t brawny enough. Gradually they open up, sharing more of themselves, their needs, fears, pasts, interests, though the years of growing resentment continue to creep in. Sometimes the conversation is rapid-fire, simultaneous conversations happening over each other, the volume increasing, Joe speaking his mind and Angela pleading with him not to. Hawk and Pina looking on in amusement. Eventually, though, conversation turns to something much more surprising and unexpected. Before Joe can complain about the volume of the nighttime activities upstairs, Hawk jumps in to apologize for it first. And then they explain to their stunned and fascinated hosts that they embrace free love and group sex, usually foursomes, but sometimes with as many as six participants. Obviously the hosts have a lot of questions and the conversation becomes surprisingly easy and comfortable. And that is when Hawk and Pina extend an invitation of their own, revealing not only the multi-layered meaning of the film’s title, but giving way to a more important and necessary discussion of love and relationships, which ones can be saved and which ones can’t, and how to tell the difference. 

With incredible performances, crisp and often hilarious dialogue, The Invite will be known as Olivia Wilde’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and this is not only fair, but an obvious influence. There are also shades of Husbands and Wives, Woman Under the Influence, and more recently, Splitsville. The most remarkable thing about The Invite is not the films it is like, but in the way we are invited to be part of something special, thoughtful, and refreshingly hopeful.

Grade: A

This review is from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival where The Invite had its world premiere.