Movies

Latest Stories

John Cena in Coyote vs Acme Review

Coyote vs. Acme Review: Justice for the Looney Tunes Is Here

Anne Hathaway in End of Oak Street Review

The End of Oak Street Review: The Best Dinosaur Movie in Decades

Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in One Night Only Review

One Night Only Review: Dystopia with a Happy Ending

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review - Tom Holland’s Finest Outing in the Mask

Evil Dead Burn Review

Evil Dead Burn Review - Grueling Horror, But Not in the Good Way

Catherine Laga'aia and Dwayne Johnson in Moana Review

Moana Review: A Remake That’s Most Unwelcome

Zoey Deutch and John Slattery in Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass Review: Good Wholesome Hollywood Filth

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

Latest reviews

Coyote vs. Acme Review: Justice for the Looney Tunes Is Here

The End of Oak Street Review: The Best Dinosaur Movie in Decades

One Night Only Review: Dystopia with a Happy Ending

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review - Tom Holland’s Finest Outing in the Mask

Evil Dead Burn Review - Grueling Horror, But Not in the Good Way

Latest Video

Latest Stories

Milly Alcock in Supergirl Review

Supergirl Review: Milly Alcock Rocks in Uneven Space Western Mashup

Jessie and Bullseye in Toy Story 5 Review

Toy Story 5 Review: Jessie Rides Again in Classic Pixar Adventure

Hugh Jackman in Death of Robin Hood Review

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

Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day Review

Disclosure Day Review: Steven Spielberg’s Coda to a Lifetime of Alien Movies

Wayans Brothers and Regina Hall in Scary Movie 6 review

Scary Movie 6 Review: High on Fumes

He-Man in Masters of the Universe Review

Masters of the Universe Review: A Cute Kids Movie When It Isn’t Trying to Be Barbie

Chiewetel Eiojofor in Backrooms review

Backrooms Review: A24 Expansion of YouTube Series Goes in Circles

Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian and Grogu Review

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu Review: This Is Not the Way

Latest features

X-Men Has Already Got Its Mister Sinister Right With Nathaniel Milbury

The MCU X-Men Needs to Do Right By Storm

Let Dinosaurs Rule Hollywood Movies Again

Lanterns: Guardians of the Universe, Abin Sur, and the Green Lantern Corps Explained

The End of Oak Street Ending Is So Much More Screwed Up Than You Realize

Read the latest issue

Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson in Michael. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate

Michael Review: A Sainted and Sanitized Michael Jackson

Monster in Lee Cronin's The Mummy Review

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Review: Evil Dead, Egyptian Style

Nick Jonas as Danny and Paul Rudd as Rick in Power Ballad.

Power Ballad Review: Paul Rudd’s Finest

Zazie Beetz wields a fire axe in They Will Kill You.

They Will Kill You Review: Ready or Not Here It Is

Samara Weaving in Over Your Dead Body Review

Over Your Dead Body Review: Samara Weaving Delights in 'Murder Your Spouse' Comedy

Adam Scott in Hokum Review

Hokum Review: Adam Scott’s Irish Holiday Is Like a (Grim) Fairy Tale

Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton in Ready or Not 2 Review

Ready or Not 2 Review: The Devil Is in the Bloody Good Details

Keke Palmer in I Love Boosters

I Love Boosters Review: Boots Riley Blends Fashion With Surreal Sci-Fi