The Invite Tries Way Too Hard for 45 Minutes. Then the Cast Takes Over.

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Olivia Wilde shot her third feature in 23 days, in order, on a single apartment set, and then watched seven studios fight over it on a Saturday night in Park City. A24 won, paid north of $12 million, and sat on the thing for five months. As of June 26 you can finally see what the fuss was about. "The Invite" is a dinner party that goes wrong, the oldest trick in the theater, and for a long stretch it plays like a filmmaker trying to convince you she has reinvented the trick. Then it stops trying, and it gets very good.

The setup

Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde) are a married couple in a thin patch. He was a promising musician once and now teaches middle school band. She has been functionally stuck at home for years and is bored down to the bone. The noises through the ceiling belong to the upstairs neighbors, Pína (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), bohemians who long ago threw out the rulebook on monogamy and built a life around appetite. Angela, half as a peace offering and half as a grenade rolled at her husband, invites them down for dinner.

You already know roughly where this is heading. The script, by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, knows you know. It is a remake of Cesc Gay's Spanish stage play, previously filmed as the 2020 movie "The People Upstairs," and the bones are sturdy enough to survive any renovation. The question the night keeps circling is whether the two couples are going to complete the arithmetic everyone in the room can see coming. No spoilers on whether they do.

The problem with the first half

Here is the honest knock, and it is the one most critics who caught it at Sundance landed on. The opening stretch is overcooked. Wilde and cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra (who shot Rogen's terrific Apple series "The Studio") wedge the actors into the corners of the frame, bounce the action off mirrors to fake split screens, and at one point seem to shoot through a mouse hole. Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert called it the kind of over-direction that makes you wonder if it is a parody of festival-bait indies. Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange) scores a tense comic scene with shrieking horror-movie strings, which tells you how hard the movie is straining early on to convince you it is more than four people in a room.

It is a real flaw, not a quibble, and it is why this is not the slam dunk the bidding war implied. Vulture's Bilge Ebiri came out the other side unconvinced, arguing the emotional turns never fully earn themselves. He is not wrong about the front half.

What saves it

Around the midpoint the movie exhales. The fancy compositions step back, the strings shut up, and the four actors are handed the picture. That is the right call, because the cast is the reason to go.

Rogen is the MVP, and not in the way you would guess. He brings real self-loathing and regret to Joe, and when the character gets injured and spends a chunk of the night immobile, groaning and cursing, Rogen turns physical helplessness into the best slapstick of his career. Critics from The Hollywood Reporter to RogerEbert flagged him as the anchor. Norton gives Hawk, an ex-firefighter turned street-corner philosopher of free love, two monologues, one sad and one closer to profound, and lands both without winking. Cruz plays Pína as a woman still chasing a teenager's urge to shock, who cannot quite see how scared she is underneath it. Wilde, as Angela, does the quietest and maybe trickiest work: every time the talk turns to sex you watch fear, curiosity, and hunger fight it out behind her eyes.

The comparison everyone reached for was "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Owen Gleiberman at Variety called it "marvelously entertaining" and ran with the Albee parallel. Adam Chitwood at TheWrap called the result something like that play's "great-great-grandchild," and "endlessly relatable, sometimes uncomfortably so." The Guardian's Benjamin Lee gave it four stars and called it "a genuinely funny and uncommonly intelligent comedy for adults," which is rarer at the multiplex than it should be. IndieWire's Kate Erbland landed on a B+, third-act wobble and all.

The verdict

The best stretch of "The Invite" is its last half hour, and Seitz, no soft touch, called it the strongest directing Wilde has done. That is the shape of the whole movie: a filmmaker who starts out trying to dazzle you, fails, and then settles into something patient and adult and a lot more impressive than the dazzle would have been. It does not pick a side between the buttoned-up couple and the free one. It watches all four people make fools of themselves and refuses to hand out grades.

A few things to know going in. It is rated R and earns it, this is a movie about sex among adults who have stopped pretending otherwise. It is opening in limited release, so depending on your city you may have to drive for it. And it is, fittingly for a movie about marriage and its discontents, dedicated to Diane Keaton.

It is uneven. It is also one of the few grown-up comedies anyone bothered to make this year, with four actors operating at the top of their range. Sit through the rough first half. The dinner is worth it.

BCN score: 7.5/10. A first-half problem and a second-half payoff, carried the whole way by a cast that does not have a weak link.

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