‘The Invite’ Review: From Awkward Comedy to Painful Relationship Drama

Neighbors are a strange, unknowable species: friends, enemies, or just people who happen to live a wall away. They intrude when least expected and, just as often, solve problems you didn’t know you had. The Invite is about neighbors—and not really. Here, they function as enigmatic catalysts, pushing a struggling couple to air their dirty laundry in painfully awkward ways. Spending time with them also means peeking into alternate lives, habits, and moral codes just a few meters away, all within a bitter comedy that gradually curdles into something far more painful.

The story originates in Cesc Gay’s 2015 play Els veïns de dalt, later translated and staged internationally as Los vecinos de arriba (The People Upstairs). It reached Buenos Aires in a production directed by Javier Daulte, starring Diego Peretti, Muriel Santa Ana, Rafael Ferro, and Julieta Vallina. Gay himself adapted it into the Spanish film Sentimental, featuring Javier Cámara, Belén Cuesta, Alberto San Juan, and Griselda Siciliani—a hit that spawned multiple international remakes. The latest, backed by A24, is this Hollywood iteration.

Olivia Wilde directs and stars as Angela opposite Seth Rogen’s Joe. Once a rock musician, Joe now teaches music with palpable indifference, nursing back pain and a Woody Allen–esque neurosis that leans more pathetic than cynical. Angela, meanwhile, is wound tight, obsessed with keeping a perfect home while enduring her husband’s constant irritations. He wants quiet to wallow; she wants control to keep things from falling apart.

Then come the neighbors—invited by her, much to his dismay. As the couple bickers over dinner preparations and Joe’s discomfort with their loudly sexual upstairs counterparts, the guests arrive all smiles. Piña (a reworked role for Penélope Cruz) is a sensual Spanish psychologist, and her partner Hawk (Edward Norton), a retired firefighter, immediately sense the tension. What follows is a night of escalating friction, revelations, humor, and the creeping certainty that nothing will end well.

As a director, Wilde leans even more heavily than Gay into the material’s theatrical roots, confining the action to a single apartment while finding elegant visual strategies to keep it dynamic. Her version, scripted by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, starts out more overtly comedic and nervier in rhythm, thanks largely to Rogen and Wilde’s performances. While many situations echo Sentimental, the film introduces culturally specific twists that reflect American habits and sensibilities. The most significant departure comes in the third act, which takes the story in new directions and stretches the runtime well beyond the original’s lean 82 minutes.

Still, The Invite stands on its own rather than as a mere copy. Its biggest asset is a sharp ensemble: Rogen proves surprisingly effective in the dramatic turns, while Cruz leans into—and knowingly plays with—the stereotype of the sexually liberated European woman. What begins as a clash over differing attitudes toward sex gradually reveals a deeper emotional crisis at the core of Joe and Angela’s relationship. The film sheds its comedic skin to expose a couple stuck in a stagnating bond that seems headed for collapse.

Entertaining yet edged with real emotional weight, The Invite is the kind of film that viewers in their forties and fifties may find uncomfortably relatable. Its script cleverly smuggles heavy themes into a comedic framework, making easier to swallow what is, ultimately, a far more bitter pill than it first appears. Neighbors can be a nuisance—but they can also serve as an unflattering mirror.