There is a particular kind of dread that accompanies the arrival of unexpected guests. Not the polite, pre-arranged sort – the ones you can prepare for with a tidy flat and a decent bottle of wine – but the neighbours who materialise at your door with an energy that suggests they intend to stay until the small hours. Olivia Wilde understands this dread intimately. In The Invite, her third feature as director and a film that became the most fiercely contested acquisition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, she transforms this very domestic anxiety into something far more dangerous: a comedy that peels back the varnish of middle-class respectability to expose what lies beneath.
The film, which opens in limited US release on 26 June before expanding wide on 10 July through A24, is Wilde’s triumphant return to the kind of character-driven, dialogue-heavy filmmaking that made Booksmart (2019) such a sensation. After the divisive spectacle of Don’t Worry Darling (2022), The Invite feels like a recalibration – a stripping-back to essentials that proves Wilde’s instincts as a director are sharper than ever.
A Spanish Foundation, an American Unravelling
The screenplay, adapted by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack from Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film Sentimental (released in some markets as The People Upstairs), establishes its premise with surgical economy. Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde) are a married couple whose relationship has entered the quiet, corrosive phase of mutual resentment. Joe teaches music. Angela wants more from life than their San Francisco apartment can offer. The renovation noise – their constant, grinding home improvements – has bled through the ceiling into the flat above, where their new neighbours, Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pína (Penélope Cruz), conduct a love life of such audible vigour that the walls themselves seem to vibrate.
When Angela insists on hosting these upstairs neighbours for dinner, the stage is set for a single-evening chamber piece in which every polite surface cracks open. Gay’s original film was a taut, minimalist exercise inSpanish farce – 80 minutes of escalating awkwardness that drew comparisons to the works of Pedro Almodóvar. Wilde and her screenwriters have expanded the canvas considerably, layering in backstory, subtext, and a willingness to let the comedy breathe in ways that feel distinctly American.
The Bidding War That Shook Park City
The Invite premiered on Saturday 24 January 2026 at the Eccles Theater, the 1,270-seat venue that serves as Sundance’s grandest stage. The screening was attended by what Variety described as “industry heavyweights,” and the reaction was immediate: a standing ovation that brought Wilde to tears. She returned to the stage, wiped her eyes, and thanked the audience before calling out Rogen, Norton, and her crafts team – a gesture that spoke to the collaborative spirit she has cultivated throughout her career.
What followed was the most heated distribution battle Sundance had seen in years. Within 72 hours, bids from A24, Netflix, Focus Features, Searchlight Pictures, Neon, Apple TV, Sony, and a newly launched specialty label from Warner Bros (christened Warner Bros. Clockwork) had pushed the price above $10 million. Wilde, crucially, insisted on a theatrical release – a condition that ruled out Netflix despite its willingness to pay more. “I think it just proves every single time that the movies that are made outside the system, and therefore with the freedom to allow for creative experimentation, they are always the ones that ultimately the studios end up recognising as being valuable,” she told IndieWire during a keynote chat at the festival.
A24 ultimately prevailed in the eight-figure deal, a acquisition that positions The Invite as one of the studio’s most significant releases of 2026. The partnership is a reunion of sorts: A24 previously distributed Wilde’s Booksmart, and the film reunites her with producer Megan Ellison and Annapurna Pictures.
The Ensemble That Makes It Sing
Wilde has spoken openly about her improvisational rehearsal process, a two-week workshop in which Jones, McCormack, Rogen, Cruz, and Norton lived with the characters before cameras rolled. The result is a performance from Rogen that many critics have called the finest of his career – a portrayal of a man whose disappointments have calcified into passive aggression, but whose vulnerability remains achingly present. Collider’s Ross Bonaime noted that “maybe more than any other character, we can feel the weight of the past through his performance,” a quality that elevates the film beyond its farcical setup.
Norton and Cruz, as the freewheeling upstairs couple, provide the necessary counterpoint. There is something deliberately disorienting about Cruz’s performance as Pína – a warmth and openness that initially reads as menace, then as something more complex. Norton, meanwhile, brings his characteristic intensity to Hawk, a man whose philosophical pronouncements about love and freedom mask their own insecurities. Edward Norton praised Wilde at the Sundance Q&A: “Seth and I both have directed films that we’ve been acting in as well. Inevitably, you come to moments where you say, ‘This was a terrible decision.’ It’s hard for me to overstate the grace and wisdom with which Olivia gave that performance and directed us.”
The script by Jones and McCormack – whose previous collaboration, Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012), also concerned itself with the messiness of romantic disintegration – avoids easy resolutions. The dinner does not simply descend into chaos; it spirals through layers of revelation, each one peeling back another layer of pretence. The humour, as The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney observed in his review, is “immensely pleasurable,” but it is anchored by genuine emotional weight. Wilde, Rooney wrote, is “at this point, hard to deny she’s the real deal as a director.”
Devonté Hynes and the Sound of Discomfort
One of the film’s most intriguing creative decisions is the appointment of Devonté Hynes – the British musician and composer known for his work as Blood Orange – to score the picture. Hynes, whose previous film work includes Queen & Slim (2019) and Persuasion (2022), brings a rhythmic sophistication to the domestic tension. His score pulses beneath the dialogue like a second conversation, one conducted in feeling rather than words. It is a choice that signals Wilde’s ambition: The Invite is not merely a comedy of manners, but a study of the music that plays underneath every relationship – the rhythms of desire, the dissonance of silence.
The film was shot by Adam Newport-Berra, whose work on The Spectacular Now (2013) and Booksmart demonstrated a talent for finding visual poetry in confined spaces. San Francisco, with its characteristic fog and Victorian architecture, provides an appropriately claustrophobic backdrop. The editing team of Yorgos Mavropsaridis – known for his long collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos on films such as The Favourite and Poor Things – and Anthony Boys keeps the pacing taut across the film’s 107-minute runtime.
Why Theatrical Matters
Wilde’s insistence on a theatrical release is not merely an aesthetic preference; it is a statement about the nature of comedy itself. “The Invite” is a film that depends on collective response – the shared gasp, the communal laugh, the discomfort of watching someone else’s marriage disintegrate while the person next to you shifts in their seat. Wilde told IndieWire that she wanted audiences to experience the film together, to feel the electric charge of watching four people trapped in a room with no exit.
This philosophy aligns with A24’s own approach to distribution, which has consistently prioritised theatrical experiences for its most significant releases. The studio’s decision to give The Invite a limited opening on 26 June – placing it at the very start of the summer season – suggests confidence in the film’s ability to generate word-of-mouth. The wide expansion on 10 July positions it as a counter-programming option against the blockbusters that will dominate the multiplexes.
A Film for Our Anxious Age
At its core, The Invite is a film about the gap between what we present and what we feel. Joe and Angela perform normalcy for their guests; Hawk and Pína perform freedom. Both couples are engaged in the same fundamental act: constructing a narrative of their relationship that they can live with. The dinner party becomes a pressure cooker in which these performances are tested, deconstructed, and ultimately revealed as insufficient.
This is not new territory for the comedy of manners – one can trace a direct line from the drawing-room farces of Noël Coward to the domestic satires of Nancy Meyers to the neurotic sophistication of Woody Allen. But Wilde brings a contemporary specificity to the material. The anxieties here are not merely romantic; they are economic, professional, generational. Joe’s career as a music professor carries the weight of unfulfilled ambition. Angela’s restlessness speaks to a broader cultural malaise. The neighbours’ sexual freedom is both aspirational and slightly desperate – a performance of liberation that may mask its own form of entrapment.
The Sundance response – a 91% fresh rating across 32 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of publication – suggests that critics have recognised this layered quality. The Invite is not merely a crowd-pleaser; it is a film that takes its audience seriously, trusting them to find the humour in discomfort and the beauty in failure. As Wilde told the Eccles audience after the premiere, receiving her standing ovation with visible emotion: “This was the dream.”
The film is also programmed in the main competition of the 73rd Sydney Film Festival, extending its international profile beyond the US market. In the UK, distribution rights were acquired by Black Bear Pictures through FilmNation Entertainment, ensuring that British audiences will have access to what is shaping up to be one of the most talked-about comedies of the year.
The Dinner Party as Mirror
The dinner party has always been cinema’s favourite laboratory for human behaviour. From The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie to The Big Chill, from My Dinner with Andre to Parasite, the shared meal has served as a stage on which class, desire, and power are performed, contested, and occasionally destroyed. Wilde enters this tradition with confidence and a refreshing lack of pretension. The Invite is not trying to reinvent the form; it is trying to inhabit it with honesty.
What makes the film resonate is its refusal to judge its characters. Joe is not a villain for his resentment; Angela is not wrong for wanting more. Even Hawk and Pína, whose openness initially seems like a provocation, are revealed to be as confused and frightened as everyone else. The film’s greatest insight is that there is no such thing as a normal relationship – only relationships that are better or worse at concealing their own dysfunction.
This is the territory that Sara Bright explored in her piece on film ratings and what they conceal – the systems of classification that shape our expectations of what cinema should be and do. The Invite, rated R for its frank discussions of sex and its language, earns that rating honestly. It does not deploy profanity or sexual content for shock value; it uses them as the currency of intimacy, the words and acts that people reserve for the spaces behind closed doors.
For readers tracking the broader landscape of British film culture, the BAFTA season – recently covered in these pages – offers a useful counterpoint. Where the BAFTAs often reward spectacle and period grandeur, The Invite argues for the power of the small, the contained, the domestic. It is a reminder that the most dramatic events in human life rarely occur on battlefields or in palaces. They occur in kitchens, over dishes that no one wants to wash.
As the summer release calendar fills with sequels and superhero spectacles, The Invite stands as a quiet argument for a different kind of cinema – one that trusts its audience to care about four people in a room, arguing about love. Wilde has made a film that is both deeply pleasurable and genuinely unsettling, a comedy that understands that the funniest things in life are often the ones that hurt the most. The guests are coming. The door is opening. What happens next is up to us.
