So, do you guys like to party?
dir: Olivia Wilde
2026
Exhausting.
Aren’t you tired of people writing about how something happening in the zeitgeist, or something trending on social media is, in and of itself, exhausting?
Well, okay, so I am using it to describe the experience of watching this movie, but I don’t actually mean it in a negative sense. I mean, I guess I assume when people say something is exhausting, or that a person is exhausting, or that they are exhausted, that it’s inherently negative.
Some experiences are great even if they’re exhausting. Rock climbing. Going for a long run. Hours of dancing at a rave.
I am perhaps playing semantic games, but I think there’s a genre of movies, especially of dramas, that depends on being exhausting in order to hit harder, and yet still be enjoyable. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? didn’t invent the genre of couples tearing strips off of each other in front of another couple, but one could almost say that Edward Albee and Mike Nichols may have perfected it (along with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton’s sterling efforts). I guess that’s why it’s always cited by lazy hacks (such as myself), but there’s a strong argument to be made that it’s a benchmark for a reason.
This film here, The Invite isn’t based on a stage play, but you know where it’s coming from. One setting, two couples, endless combinations and permutations, endless opportunities for the characters to say terrible or terribly hilarious things. There are so many levels upon which stories like this can work, but there’s also the matter of what we bring as viewers, whether it’s the lived experience of having been in long term relationships / marriages or our expectations based on the experiences of our friends and family.
For some of us, too many of us, the worst parts of what can happen in relationships is well known and often dreaded, so at least this flick isn’t operating on that level (thankfully). Despite how frantic or caustic the flick may seem, it’s still trying to remain funny and relatable rather than painful or devastating.
And for some people that’s going to make the experience seem a bit superficial. For others, depressingly familiar. Also I think the age difference in potential audiences would vastly impact on how they’re going to absorb some of the arguments presented here, which are going to seem pretty universal (to people in their 40s and beyond), and pretty repellent to people in their twenties.
Our primary couple are two people in their, I dunno, early to mid-forties living their lives of loud, irritable desperation in San Francisco. That the story is set in San Francisco is only relevant because Joe (Seth Rogen) is shown riding a bike up some of San Fran’s many hills.
He hates the bike. It is a folding bike. He rides it home from work, at a conservatory where he teaches music, although in the one scene where we see him working he is completely checked out.
Then he endures a gruelling, for him, saga to get home. It doesn’t take twenty years but it is nonetheless a Nolanesque Odyssey for him, with the bike being the Trojan horse within which all his failures and disappointments are hidden within.
Once arrived at the familial home, a nice apartment, and lying on the floor bitching about his back, the conflict and sniping with his wife Angela (Olivia Wilde, who also directs) starts immediately. It reaches a fever pitch, peaking instantly before the title flashes up, as if to warn us “it’s going to get conflictual up in this bitch!”
In some ways it’s daring people to not watch the rest of the film, but it’s kinda comedic and kinda sneaky. While the couple argue throughout the rest of the flick, it’s not at this tempo, in this register. This initial scene is telling us where these two crazy kids / love birds (almost middle-aged dullards with no passion left for anything other than fighting and conspicuous consumption) are at: a decade at least of resentment, accumulated slights and disappointments, and unhealthy ways of expressing the initial irritations but never the underlying issues underneath.
Angela tells Joe that, like she told him yesterday, the recently moved in couple from upstairs will be coming to dinner. Guess who’s… coming at dinner? Joe hates the couple from upstairs, even though he doesn’t know them at all, and, to be honest, seeing as he’s a bored middle-aged man, he seems to hate everyone. But them, specifically in the context of this flick, he hates because of their vigorous and extended sex sessions. He particularly resents being reminded of all the sex he’s not having. He hates especially that the woman in the couple seems to have the loudest and most explosive extended orgasms, seemingly an experience that his own wife has never shared.
She, being Angela, is clearly envious of those orgasms. She too wishes she could experience that, and is fascinated by the people who could produce such joy, hence the dinner invitation to find out finally what these people are like.
Of course the dinner aspect of the dinner invite is a complete catastrophe, because these people aren’t prepared in any way to host a dinner, regardless of how much Angela tells Joe that she definitely told him about the dinner and how she texted him to get wine. She makes a soufflé, which, the moment she said she was baking a soufflé, we knew, at least, was never going to be consumed by a living human being.
Her charcuterie skills, though? Oh wow, all those preserved, processed meats artfully arrayed, and all those cheeses. There are so many examples of cured meats that you know, you just know, their guests are going to be vegetarians. What about the cheeses? No, sorry, lactose intolerant, um, the crackers? Gluten intolerance, of course, of fucking course.
So, yes, there’s the excruciating awkwardness of failing as a host that we have to endure on Angela’s behalf, which could be too much for some people. There’s also the desperate quality with which she touts the renovations she’s made to the place or the rugs she’s bought or the accumulated stuff she’s overpaid for, this desperate need for people to think she’s somehow an impressive person just because she’s curated the heritage tiles so completely.
It’s funny, but it’s also desperately sad. We might wonder whether depression is the issue, or anxiety (she slams down some Xanax at one point), or a restless manic confluence of both. She’s quick to cry or express emotion, and then almost as quickly apologise for it and chastise herself for feeling something. At one point she says something utterly terrible about herself, and then excuses it by saying “but that’s just my internal monologue” which is such a shocking punchline that I laughed out loud.
With these kinds of movies, there’s usually booze or drugs as an outlet, as an excuse, as a trigger to get the characters to really unleash, but that’s not the path this flick seems to tread. Unrealistically, for me, these characters drink wine, smoke joints, smash tequila shots and yet no-one at any stage seems affected or drunk. None of them really need the release in order to say the unsayable or do the unforgivable – they’re already there. They’re not even biding their time.
I haven’t even mentioned the upstairs couple yet. Of course they’re amazing. Penelope Cruz as Piña and Ed Norton, yep, that fucking Ed Norton, as Hawk. Of course they’re so attractive and calm and affectionate and sexual and chatty and passionate and warm and everything that Angela and Joe are not.
And of course Piña is a psychotherapist AND a sexologist, and Hawk is a retired fireman (sorry, as he keeps insisting, “we prefer the name ‘firefighter’) and they’re relaxed and free and freaked out by how Angela and Joe talk to and at each other. And of course they know about Joe’s burning resentment towards their loud sex life, because of course. Angela and Joe fight for over half of the film as to whether she’ll die of embarrassment if he says something, and they can’t even let Joe have that moment.
They compliment Joe for speaking his mind and expressing his true thoughts (whenever he makes sarcastic, shitty comments, directed at Angela, at them, at anything and everything in the world), but they know, as we do, how defensive, how petty, how insecure, how infantile Joe’s raging is.
We recognise the character Seth Rogan’s playing, because he’s been playing the character for over twenty years, but there is a difference here. It’s that same insecure, wickedly funny, shit talking shit stirrer, but there’s a sourness there. He’s curdled, this character has curdled, from years of stewing in regret and resentment, unable to accept that his career as a musician didn’t continue or amount to much, angry at his partner for the lack of sex in their relationship, angry at Piña and Hawk for being whoever they are, and not suffering in the same way that he is, despite being older.
When the other shoe drops, and the film twists and contorts into a new direction, once the upstairs couple make a few declarations, the film veers into almost a completely different kind of film. Yes, in some rich ways it becomes even funnier, but it’s no less fraught. If anything, the possibility of release of any kind, sexual or emotional or otherwise, really becomes more about whether people are capable of letting go of their fixations in order to expand their sense of themselves, or whether they have to stay contorted around the shrunken sense of self they have blind loyalty to, their suffering over the possibility of even a moment’s freedom.
It’s a tease, not in the sense that the upstairs characters are teasing them, but more so that they seem to be offering what Angela and Joe might think they desire, what they most desire, maybe, and yet they can’t do it. They are not people that can allow themselves to be helped. Like Joe and his back pain, he’d rather be miserable than accept a helping hand (in many senses of the words), and threatens Hawk for trying to help him.
And when Piña offers a different kind of help, he does anything he can to fuck things up.
He’d rather hurt himself than let go of his disappointment over his lot in life. But Angela is no less holding on with clenched hands to her disappointment over the man that Joe has become that she is no longer loves, unable to accept her own disappointment over being a housewife and mother.
If I’ve made the flick sound like a grind, it’s anything but. I’m not going to argue that the tone is light or that the subject matter isn’t depressing, but it’s all put together so well, and is so fleet in its filming and moves so confidently on its feet and in its performances that it didn’t feel like, for me, watching an appalling hateful argument between two people who loathe each other. It’s far funnier than that. Even if you eventually grow sick of hearing Rogan’s groaning, whining voice, you realise the flick isn’t saying these people should stay together. It’s not even saying they (really meaning “we”, as in the audience) should be like the people upstairs. It’s saying, fucking hell, long term relationships are hard. It helps if the people, regardless of how much sex they’re having with each other or the neighbours, can actually talk to each other in ways that still mean something, and still have the capacity to grow, change, adapt to the vagaries of life and each other as they change over time. Or maybe they don’t, and they stay trapped in their misery, and that’s that.
It’s not as glib as I’m making it sound. In the end the people upstairs view the downstairs couple as worthy of pity, but it’s a credit to the screenplay that they aren’t a perfect couple themselves, and hell, they haven’t even been together for a year yet.
So what the fuck do they know, anyway?
This is a harsh experience without being vicious, and it’s smart in its depiction of both couple’s dynamics without being too clever. It’s realistic and believable without being generic or mundane, and it’s truly due to the great performances everyone gives, Wilde’s exquisite direction and even the editing is tight making the construction hang together.
As great as everyone is, there are two moments I won’t spoil that show Ed Norton missed out on a career in comedy because they’re flat out two of the funniest scenes (at his expense, considering his reputation) I’ve seen in any film in the last 5 years, and they're solely acts of physical comedy. And he gives such a great, restrained performance in this flick that I never knew he was capable of it all, but he is, very much so.
Amazing, damaging, exhausting fun.
8 times why is it whenever you see documentaries about swingers they never look like Penelope Cruz or Ed Norton out of 10
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“We LOVE a contentious environment!” – of course you do - The Invite
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