A24

Latest Stories

Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti in The Debut Review

The Debut Review: Julianne Moore Gives a Russian Nesting Doll of a Performance

Linda Cardellini as Pam Voorhees in Crystal Lake

Crystal Lake: Exploring the Weird Lack of Nudity in Friday the 13th

Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything Ending

You Can See Everything: Exploring the Ending and Nathan Fielder’s Spoiler-Filled Intentions

Nathan Fielder in You Can See Everything Review

You Can See Everything Review: Nathan Fielder Vanishes in Elizabeth Holmes’ Looking Glass

Jordan Firstman in Club Kid Review

Club Kid Review: The Feel-Good A24 Gay Nightclub Movie You’ve Been Waiting For

Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen in primetime

Why Robert Pattinson Needed Lord of the Rings and Sauron to Understand Chris Hansen

Robert Patinson in Primetime review

Primetime Review: You Can’t Look Away from Robert Pattinson’s Weirdest Antihero

CRYSTAL LAKE -- Pictured: Linda Cardellini as Pam Voorhees -- (Photo by: Matt Infante/PEACOCK)

A24's Crystal Lake Trailer Promises to Solve the Biggest Friday the 13th Mystery

Latest reviews

Beef Season 2 Review: A Star-Studded Cast Grounds This Passive Aggressive Grudge Match

The Moment Review: Charli XCX Movie Is Not Nearly as Brat as It Needs to Be

Marty Supreme Review: Timothée Chalamet Scores Big in Spiritual Uncut Gems Prequel

Eternity Review: A Return of the Type of Rom-Com ‘They Don’t Make Anymore’

Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne and the Rise of Mom Trauma Cinema

Latest Video

Latest Stories

Onslaught slasher killer the butcher

Onslaught’s Adam Wingard Wants Michael Myers ‘Run Through a Military Filter’

Adriana Arjona in Onslaught Review

Onslaught Review: Adria Arjona Channels John Carpenter Vibes

Robert Pattinson in Primetime

Robert Pattinson Terrifies as Chris Hansen in Full Primetime Trailer

Crystal Lake Show

Crystal Lake Teaser Promises Friday the 13th Prequel Will Be Just a Slasher (Complimentary)

An image of the Backrooms from Backrooms.

A24 Has Confirmed its Interesting Re-Release Strategy for Backrooms

I’m not going to begin by stating emphatically that Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton play sexy-time ghosts in Olivia Wilde’s The Invite… but what if they might be ghosts, who happen to be sexy? I’m joking, but also stay with me for a minute. Still high off its buzzy premiere at Sundance, The Invite walks, blurs, and utterly dissolves all manner of boundaries and bougie festival taboos. Floating with an ethereal mystique that borders on the occult, as well as a painfully hilarious naturalism, this is a movie that orbits around a marriage in midlife catastrophe to the point of dizziness—an even more impressive feat after the film was marketed with such deceptive seduction. To be sure, Cruz and Norton are quite appealing, the seemingly perfect couple upstairs in a posh, if ancient, New York City tenement building. They initiate friendly conversation in the elevator, look gorgeous while making preternatural eye contact with neighbors, and apparently have passionate, earth-shattering sex after midnight each evening. Angela and Joe (Wilde and Seth Rogen) should know. They hear it every night through their ceiling, along with a 12-year-old daughter who is never seen in the film. There is something just otherworldly about Piña and Hawk (Cruz and Norton). And it leaves our central couple so alternatingly resentful and envious that the movie begins with an insert card of an Oscar Wilde quote: the eternal harbinger of doom for any romantic sentimentality beyond skin-deep nihilism. So when Joe and Angela invite Piña and Hawk over for a couple’s dinner, something aloof is in the air. Joe thinks it’s tension, as he is more than ready, eager even, to complain about the animal sounds through the floorboards. But for our spirited guests, the tension could have an entirely different flavor, one of suspense as they are here to—eventually—propose the downstairs stuffed shirts join them in a shared sexual experience. They want to swing by switching spouses for the night. The ghostly element I mentioned earlier is a bit of a come-on, but not by much. While the film quotes Wilde, Oscar, there’s more than a touch of Dickens and his descendants about the way Piña and Hawk float into our unhappy protagonists’ lives. They’re kinky Jacob Marleys, freaky Clarences, the angel of mercy in It’s a Wonderful Life who’s come to grant Jimmy Stewart a second chance at life after decades of disappointment by getting frisky in the kitchen. Even the audience is tempted into thinking they’re watching one kind of beguiling sex comedy, which we kind of get, even as we’re really being lured into a far more existential exploration of love and marriage after the romance has died. Are things not already in the Twilight Zone when an orgy invite from strangers amounts to the closest thing to high romance Joe or Angela’s heard in years? The trick of Olivia Wilde’s film and its inviting screenplay by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack is its structure. Based on the Spanish film The People Upstairs, Wilde’s picture borrows the original’s real-time setting of an unwieldy night of collapsing inhibitions and glasses of wine giving way to low-lit confessions in a cozy apartment’s corners. Among Jones and McCormack’s many scripted innovations, however, is the sensation that this is occurring in a bit of a theater workshop. This isn’t a knock at the performances, which are excellent, but at the sense we are sitting with a group of professionals, also over wine, as they psychoanalyze and deconstruct a messy, impermanent thing: the marriage of two people who care for each other but lost love a long time ago. Wilde shoots the film almost wholly in steadicam and in an underlit setting wherein the decorative paint colors and apartment accoutrements that Angela distracts herself with are indistinguishable. She isn’t wrong to note Joe is checked out when she talks about “finishing” the bedroom several years on, but Wilde the filmmaker cannot let her character hide behind minutiae. She drowns Angela and Joe’s faux domesticity into an inviting yet gloomy shadow world. Similarly, the helmer constantly films Rogen’s Joe as a domineering force in the life of his wife, towering over the frame and shot in harsh low light like a Halloween fright mask. At other times, the pair are caught in line of sight of each other in their horseshoe-shaped apartment, with the duo able to simply look up across the way and see one another in parallel windows. Yet they never do. It would make eye contact and break the spell of mutually agreed upon isolation. At its core, though, one does not cast a talent like Rogen, or for that matter Wilde at her most mischievous, and not revel in the humor. Rogen accentuates a new note of tired resignation to his likable, schlubby everyman persona, but there’s a lot more bitterness to Joe than Matt Remick in The Studio, as well as more pathos. This is a sad sack too self-involved to recognize he’s dragging his marriage down, but his unhappiness is not unsympathetic to anyone who reached a certain point in life where they realized they did not become the person they dreamed about when they were 20. It also makes his acerbic digs at Piña and Hawk, particularly for the latter’s clearly self-chosen name, all the more biting. Meanwhile Cruz delights in her role that purposefully walks a line between the ethereal and earthy. For much of the film, she might be a cipher, or certainly a projection of Joe and even Angela’s desires, albeit in very different contexts, but Cruz plays it with a rueful self-awareness. She’s the cat plucking at a pair of wounded canaries’ wings. The scene where she specifically attempts to uncoil Joe out of his wound-up funk to Sade’s now 26-year-old(!) “By Your Side” is a harmonious car crash; a collision of sweetness and cringe, reverie and gallows humor despair. And I haven’t even mentioned his “dance” moves. The Invite is a shimmering dramedy for adults of a certain age, and perhaps a sobering epiphany that this can now be so acutely tailored to elder Millennials and younger Gen-Xers at that. The film is genuinely sexy but in the awkward and disarming way of clumsy foreplay. It stumbles and stammers, with its proverbial pants caught around the ankles before the whole thing tonally keels over. Yet for all the screenplay’s verbose intellectualization about sensuality, and Wilde’s obvious preoccupation with it as a storyteller, the main event is something more intimate and unspoken. It’s a lament about the passage of time, milestones left discarded, and maybe even marriages that also have outlived their shelflife. One might even call it haunting, complete with the mysterious good-looking specters descending from above. Penelope Cruz and Olivia Wilde in The Invite Review

The Invite Review: Olivia Wilde’s Beguiling Sex Comedy Is the Event of Summer

Chiwetel Ejiofor in Backrooms

Google and A24's AI Partnership Announcement Is Not Going Down Well

Hugh Jackman in Death of Robin Hood Review

The Death of Robin Hood Review: Hugh Jackman Leads a Beautifully Brutal Elegy

Latest features

The Drama's Darkest Secret Is the One Nobody Is Talking About

Anne Hathaway’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ Lip Sync Win Paved the Way for Mother Mary Reign

The Drama's Ending is As Sweet As You Want It to Be

Ten Years Ago, The Witch Gave Us the Best Cinematic Satan

Glen Powell: Murder Can Have ‘An American Quality’ in How to Make a Killing

Read the latest issue

Hugh Jackman in The Death of Robin Hood 1

The Death of Robin Hood: Exclusive Look at Hugh Jackman’s Unmasking of a Legend

Twin Peaks Black Lodge

Backrooms Kids: Now’s the Time to Watch Twin Peaks

Chiwetel Ejiofor in Backrooms

Backrooms Easter Eggs: The Important Details That Set Up More Stories

Backrooms

Backrooms: Why Is Gen Z So Scared of the '80s?

Obsession and Backrooms Box office

The Age of the YouTube Filmmaker Is Here After Backrooms and Obsession's Triumph

Chiwetel Ejiofor Backrooms

Backrooms Is the First Horror Movie of the AI Era

Friday the 13th_ The Final Chapter

A24's Friday the 13th Series Must Not Try to Fix the Timeline

Chiewetel Eiojofor in Backrooms review

Backrooms Review: A24 Expansion of YouTube Series Goes in Circles