The Invite: Olivia Wilde’s sex comedy is ‘the funniest film so far this year’

Couple-swapping dramas had their heyday during the sexual revolution, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. And even the most famous of them, such as 1969’s “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”, look like “curiosities from another era” now. “Yet somehow, sexual perplexities remain in 2026.” “The Invite” started life as a play, by the Catalan writer/director Cesc Gay, which has since been turned into a film everywhere from Italy to South Korea. Now we have an American version, from director Olivia Wilde, and it is “not to be missed”.

Seth Rogen is “better than ever” as Joe, a failed musician unhappily married to frustrated housewife Angela (Wilde). One day he comes home to find that she has invited their hot upstairs neighbours – Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña (Penélope Cruz) – to dinner. Joe is furious. He doesn’t want their company, he wants them to stop having noisy sex, which is keeping him awake at night.

The dinner is a disaster: Angela has failed to check Piña’s dietary needs (“no gluten, no dairy, no meat, no sugar”) and Joe didn’t get any wine in. As the evening descends into “mayhem”, Hawk and Piña reveal that they are into sex parties, and have come to see if their hosts are open to one. Brilliantly executed, “The Invite” is “the funniest film so far this year”.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Latest Videos From

Watch full video here:

“If there is more pleasure to be had than watching great actors behaving badly, I would genuinely wish to know about it,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Cruz is wonderful, as sexy and charismatic as you could hope; Norton is “insufferably smug”; and Rogen proves he can do “emotional depth” when he tries.

The film is “hilarious”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, but it is also profound, “offering a genuinely insightful peek into the human, and marital, condition”.