"We can sense the theatrical origins of the story right from the start, with downcast music teacher Joe (Seth Rogen) arriving home one evening only to find that his fussy, anxious wife Angela (Wilde) is in the middle of preparing for a dinner party for their upstairs neighbors. Joe is not only unprepared for this, he doesn't even like these neighbors, who weird them out and keep them up at all hours having extremely loud sex."
"It makes perfect sense that, as a director, Olivia Wilde would want to follow the extravagant, ambitious disaster of Don't Worry Darling with a four-character chamber piece confined to one location. The Invite, based on the Spanish director Cesc Gay's 2020 movie The People Upstairs (which was itself based on an earlier play by Gay), features an unhappy couple inviting their upstairs neighbors for a dinner party that quickly goes to some strange places;"
The Invite centers on Joe, a downcast music teacher, and his anxious wife Angela preparing a tense dinner for their upstairs neighbors. Hawk, a retired firefighter, and Pina, a sexologist, arrive relaxed and seemingly all-knowing, unsettling the hosts by revealing they overheard Joe and Angela arguing. The film plays as a comedy with sharp exchanges and some solid laughs, but many interactions feel manufactured and contrived. Angela's hypervigilance and Joe's discomfort generate tension that contrasts with the neighbors' composed dominance, and the movie's theatrical origins show in its confined staging and focus on interpersonal dynamics.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]