Here is what you actually need to know about The Invite before you go see it: four actors who have no business working this well together do exactly that, for about an hour and forty-seven minutes, in a single San Francisco apartment. That's mostly the whole pitch. Olivia Wilde directs and stars, Seth Rogen plays her husband, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton are the neighbors who come over for dinner, and things unspool from there in ways that are genuinely hard to predict.
The movie is a remake of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, and Wilde is the third director to take a swing at this material after the project spent years in development limbo. She shot the whole thing in 23 days, in chronological order, which sounds like a constraint but reads on screen as pure energy. The script comes from Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, who wrote Celeste and Jesse Forever, and the two of them apparently workshopped the thing with the cast during rehearsals, folding in real conversations and personal digressions until the dialogue stopped feeling like a screenplay and started feeling like a dinner party you'd never been invited to but are now watching through a window.
The ensemble is what makes this worth seeing. Rogen plays a former musician now quietly drowning as a conservatory teacher, which sounds like a setup for easy jokes but lands as something more tender. Norton, doing his specific flavor of smug, gets a monologue late in the film that reframes everything you thought you knew about his character. And Cruz is quietly doing the most interesting work in the room, playing a therapist and sexologist named Piña who seems like she could tip into caricature at any moment and never does. She's the only character nobody in the movie can actually rattle.
It went to Sundance in January and sparked a bidding war that eventually topped twelve million dollars before A24 locked it down. That number matters because it tells you how a room full of industry people who watch movies for a living responded when the lights came up. Currently sitting at 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, the film opened in limited release on June 26 and goes wide on July 10, which means if you're near a theater this weekend, you have no excuse.
Honestly, the comparison that keeps coming up in reviews is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which is a lot to put on a movie like this, and The Invite isn't quite that. But it's sharper and more surprising than most adult comedies that have come out in years. If you want something to watch before you see it, go back to Wilde's Booksmart. It will remind you what this director can do when she's working in a register that actually fits her, and The Invite is that, with a bigger cast and higher stakes.
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