The playwright Oscar Wilde, in “A Woman of No Importance” (1893), quipped that “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry,” suggesting that the institution of marriage has a way of smothering romance under the weight of habit and familiarity.
This same institutional cynicism animates A24’s latest comedy, “The Invite,” Olivia Wilde’s loose adaptation of a 2020 Spanish film, “The People Upstairs.” From the outset, we are introduced to Joe and Angela, played by Seth Rogen and Wilde, a bickering couple trapped in the throes of a loveless marriage, held together primarily by resentment and their 12-year-old daughter.
Wilde, who also directed the film, has a masterful grasp of Angela’s archetype. Her performance wonderfully exudes the insecurities and frustrations of a repressed housewife, functioning on a cocktail of prescription medication and channeling her anxieties into perennial redecoration. This leads to such vexing domestic inquiries as “Is that a new rug?” when her husband stumbles home, weary and stupefied, from work.
The reason Angela has procured this new rug, we soon learn, is to impress their hip and suave upstairs neighbors, Hawk and Piña, played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz at her most seductive. Indifferent to conventional mores, the couple throw lavish swinger parties and express affection in such excessive and saccharine degrees that they begin to resemble villains in a Larry David sketch. Joe and Angela know this because, every other night, they can hear what sounds like a brothel operating directly above their ceiling.
For Angela, this bohemian hippie lifestyle presents something of a buoy. Her sexuality is so thoroughly repressed that she sees Hawk and Piña’s arrival as a last-ditch opportunity to “spice things up.” The film is appreciably cleverer than simply sending its vanilla couple tumbling into a lewd spiral of orgies and erotic humiliation. Its real interest lies in the awkward and comic realization that a sexually fallow marriage is often a symptom of emotional detachment.
Rogen, whose raspy disposition I usually find grating, portrays Joe with such conviction that you would think he had personally experienced the same failures and resentments. A defeated jazz musician, Joe has been relegated to teaching at a third-rate music conservatory and smoking pot — his version of prescription Xanax — in an apartment he inherited from his parents. Eventually, he concedes to being a failure who amounted to nothing.
Joe and Angela live in a constant state of misery, unwilling to connect with each other except through complaint. “We haven’t had sex in a year,” they confess later in the dinner party. It is under these grim and isolating circumstances that Angela tries to bring fresh friends into their lives by inviting over the upstairs libertines. “We’re not cancelling; we don’t have friends,” she scowls at Joe after he suggests they are unprepared to host, having arrived home worn out from work and without the wine she had asked him to fetch.
Hastily finalizing her charcuterie before the guests arrive, Angela whips out a perfectly fine bottle of champagne from the fridge and asks, “Is this weird?” Joe, confused, replies that yes, it is: “What is this, New Year’s?” This is plainly wrong. Champagne is the perfect aperitif for any dinner party at any time of year. It is refreshing, sprightly, and naturally pairs with anything. Are these people so estranged from pleasure that even champagne seems suspicious?
Among the most celebrated episodes of NBC’s “The Office” is “Dinner Party.” It is engrossing precisely because of how difficult it is to watch, capturing clawing awkwardness and discomfort with almost sadistic precision. It is a testament to Wilde’s directorial talent that “The Invite” captures a similar feeling of morbid embarrassment and unease. Complementing intimate camera shots with tense, brooding string arrangements composed by Devonté Hynes, Wilde creates a palpable sense of claustrophobia inside the couple’s apartment, such that the rooms themselves often feel like part of the cast in the evening’s slow-motion collapse.
I have rarely recoiled with as much discomfort and internal pain as I did watching a wide-eyed, wickedly desperate Wilde coerce Rogen into opening a 1982 Château Haut-Brion, the legendary first-growth Bordeaux from Pessac-Léognan, to serve their guests in the absence of literally anything else in their apartment. The indignity is compounded by Joe pulling it out of a cupboard and uncorking it without even bringing it to proper cellar temperature, to say nothing of decanting the bottle. It is an act of vino vandalism, made worse by the knowledge that nobody in the room is emotionally stable enough to appreciate what has just been sacrificed.
Returning to Oscar Wilde, the film ultimately pushes back against his aphorism. Marriage has not stripped Joe and Angela of affection; their reluctance to communicate has. Their love has withered under years of avoidance and disappointment. This becomes exceedingly clear when their lascivious guests begin divulging their raunchy escapades and give the beguiled Joe and Angela what amounts to a TED Talk on swinging. “There’s a menu you mark off: bondage, pegging, whatever you’re into,” Hawk explains, as if he were a waiter reciting the specials.
Despite its R rating, the film is largely suggestive in dialogue rather than explicit in action. Its most revealing moment comes when Angela and Joe, both brimming with sexual frustration, indulge their guests’ amorous advances, only to botch their attempted orgy with the grace of Woody Allen trying cocaine in “Annie Hall.” This barely qualifies as a spoiler, since the film’s tone is decidedly conservative. This is hardly some avant-garde French exercise where orgies are as encouraged and commonplace as cigarettes.
What Joe and Angela come to understand is that intimacy and physical affection are manifestations of love and mutual trust. Detached from that context, sex becomes a vapid hedonistic pursuit, thrilling in the moment and hollow almost immediately after, leaving you chasing the same high in perpetuity.
“The Invite” is a thrilling minimalist comedy about love, marriage, and family. As Wilde’s third directorial feature, it is easily her strongest, conveying a palpable conviction in family as something worth preserving rather than escaping. There is a memorable scene in which Angela bellows at a moping Joe, “You have a daughter who worships you,” reminding the erstwhile musician that there are far more important things in life than stardom and sold-out shows.
Oscar Wilde’s skepticism toward marriage holds no weight here. The reason to marry, “The Invite” suggests, is precisely to remain — and always be — in love.
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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
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