The Invite is a savagely funny study of marital despair

It’s just an impromptu, informal get-together between new neighbours. On the menu, along with a sweating cheese platter and a board of flaccid charcuterie: resentment, disappointment and simmering fury over a noise issue. The atmosphere is combustible even before someone suggests an orgy.

This caustic chamber piece – uproarious and mortifying in almost equal measure – is a resounding return to form for Olivia Wilde as a director, following Don’t Worry Darling, her uneven, controversy-plagued second film. This remake of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish language comedy The People Upstairs, which was itself based on Gay’s stage play, occasionally betrays its theatrical origins, but the crackling dialogue and crisp pacing carries it.

Unfolding almost entirely in a single location – the obsessively tasteful and oppressively tidy San Francisco apartment of Joe (Seth Rogan) and Angela (Wilde) – the film is more modest in scope than the high-concept Don’t Worry Darling and closer, in its forensic examination of social dynamics, to Wilde’s directorial debut, the excellent Book Smart. What the film loses in breadth of storytelling it more than makes up for in ruthless focus. The premise helps Wilde showcase her strengths as a director: her handling of her excellent cast, and her deft navigation of dramatic shifts in mood and emotional temperature.

The film opens with a brief glimpse of life outside the shrine to marital unhappiness that is Joe and Angela’s home. Joe has finished another dispiriting day teaching music at a mid-tier university. His mode of transport is a folding bike that doesn’t fold. He hauls it on to subway escalators, with much aggrieved huffing. The only time we see him riding it is when he is cycling up one of San Fran’s relentless hills. The symbolism is clear: this is a man with a chip on his shoulder, a man who is the author of his own misery and who feels it necessary to inflict it on the wider world. It’s a testament to Rogen’s personal charm that his abrasive, self-pitying character is still – somehow – likable.

While the bike is a metaphor for Joe’s identity, the apartment performs the same role for Angela. It’s both her pride and her prison; a perpetual displacement activity to distract from her unhappiness. Look closely and you’ll find signs of discord everywhere: the three near-identical paint colours on one wall represent a regular pitstop in the circular argument that is their relationship; the unloved piano is a monument to Joe’s failed career as a rock star.

Joe crumples through his front door and collapses, theatrically, on the floor. Angela, fizzing with anxiety, reminds him that their upstairs neighbours, Piña (an electric Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), are due to visit in a matter of minutes. But Joe remembers nothing about this arrangement, and has been nurturing a unilateral hostility towards the other couple, in part due to Hawk’s insistence on making eye contact in the lift, but mainly because of Hawk and Piña’s extremely audible and showily prolonged bouts of floorboard-rattling sex. Joe’s threat to confront them hangs over the evening’s innocuous small talk and pleasantries, like a dildo-shaped sword of Damocles.

But somewhere during the night, the atmosphere shifts. Angela and Hawk bond over a shared appreciation of rugs; Joe and Piña smoke a spliff. Then Hawk and Piña drop a bombshell: they are swingers who host sex parties. And, they ask, would Joe and Angela be interested in joining them?

This is a “getting it up with the Joneses” tale that neatly taps into envy, dissatisfaction and the fear that everyone else is leading a superior life. Clearly, such themes have reach: in addition to this US version, Gay’s original film has also been remade in Italian, German, French, Russian, Czech and Korean. A Flemish language version is in the works. And while this film lacks some of the lean efficiency of the original, which clocked in at a brisk 82 minutes, it’s a savagely funny study of a relationship in its death throes, between two people who hate each other and themselves. Put like that, The Invite should be an almighty downer, but this astringent picture ends on a note of harmony.

Photograph by Adam Newport-Berra /Invite Distribution