Olivia Wilde’s Foursome Is an Expertly Crafted, Bitingly Hilarious Sport of Marital Jenga

In case you’ve lived in any metropolis, wherever, you have in all probability had the expertise of listening to your neighbors have intercourse. Relying on how safe you might be in your personal relationship, chances are you’ll find yourself questioning in the event you’ve ever had an orgasm fairly just like the one you are at the moment listening to by the partitions. When was the final time my companion made like to me like that? With out solely auditory assist to go off of, it may be straightforward to imagine the grass is greener upstairs.

If, like Joe and Angela (Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde, respectively), you are already on the finish of your marriage’s ropes, and you have not touched one another in, say, a full calendar 12 months, the sound of intercourse can really feel threatening. Like mockery, even. It will probably even be the ultimate domino that ends your decaying partnership.

Tailored by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack from the Spanish movie The Folks Upstairs by Cesc Homosexual, The Invite is a magnetic, acerbically humorous, romantic nightmare within the vein of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. It was by no means a doubt that this explicit foursome of actors might maintain the ball so excessive up within the air, however what actually mesmerizes is Wilde’s crisp and meticulous course. The Invite is like watching a recreation of Jenga, if the 4 characters had been the highest layer and all the pieces beneath them was a torrent of bitterness and lies.

The movie could also be Sundance’s greatest comedy of the competitionin addition to its most incisive exploration of marriage and intercourse. At its greatest, it performs like a Neil Simon play or John Cassavetes’s jazzy movie improvisations. It is usually all the time stupefying. It conquers that nice mountain that each movie aspires to be: each inevitable and stunning on the identical second. It definitely is stunning for Joe, a music instructor at a neighborhood school in California’s East Bay, who comes dwelling at some point to search out that his spouse has gone fully overboard in preparation for a double-date dinner he had, seemingly, no concept was occurring.

The desk has an enormous meat and cheese board, there is a new Persian rug, she’s sporting new garments; Joe, in the meantime, is insistent the plan was by no means made. Cue a shortly escalating battle packed filled with absurdly hilarious barbarisms and plain outdated imply jabs. Joe is pissed off on the incessant intercourse noises whereas Angela is clearly turned on by it; Joe threatens to deliver it up at dinner. The bombastic battle doesn’t finish a lot as (briefly) pause on the arrival of Hawk and Pina (Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz, respectively).

The upstairs neighbors appear to be all the pieces they aren’t: affected person with one another, flirtatious, courteous. They’re additionally romantically aggressive. It’s by no means clear if Hawk is purposefully making sexual puns or if it simply appears like that to an already on-alert Joe. Nonetheless, the night continues, and the mere presence of this odd however glad couple solely exacerbates an already tough patch of communication for the hosts.

Wilde makes the distinctly poor communication cinematic by persistently framing her characters in off-centered reflections in mirrors and window panes, or else barely eliminated by door jambs and archways. Composed with a wrenching string rating by Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange, this four-person chamber drama escalates in taut stress as increasingly more secrets and techniques are revealed, and deeper insults are flung. All of it’s all the extra highly effective due to the labyrinth that Wilde’s course and Hynes music creates. Characters are paired off, re-united and thrown at one another with alacrity. The house feels each infinite and cramped.

What they study their upstairs neighbors, and what they study their hosts, constantly amplifies every character’s hang-ups, needs and agonies. Hawk’s very identify appears to problem Joe’s masculinity, which is not helped when he learns that he is a former firefighter. Pina is a psychotherapist and sexologist. It is like they’ve tapped their neighbor’s telephones.

Like an accordion, Joe and Angela are pulled aside and again collectively and aside once more again and again as every dialog and every glass of wine is re-filled and every joint is re-lit. The night is a prepare wreck, however, elegantly, Wilde, who additionally turns in one in every of her greatest performances of her profession, lets the mud settle in a stunning and tender method. Marriage could be fantastic; it can be tough. It will probably generally be each on the identical time. What makes The Invite in the end so particular is its unabashed honesty, even when it means doom. Like a fancy symphony, it may well, and may, hit all of the notes.

The Invite screened on the 2026 Sundance Movie Competition.