\u201cThe power of love\u2026 a force from above\u2026 cleaning my soul.\u201d So sang Frankie Goes To Hollywood. A beautiful sentiment it is too. Such musings dominate music, poetry, literature and cinema. But what about when love dies? When your soul isn\u2019t getting cleaned, but dragged through the dirt? That\u2019s power. A rotten, bleak, creeping power, but power all the same.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n This is the power that drives Olivia Wilde\u2019s The Invite, and it is very much not a date movie. It\u2019s more of a warning: to keep perspective, to not let the rot set in before it\u2019s too late. Also, it\u2019s a comedy.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Screenwriting partnership Rashida Jones and Will McCormack are behind the script \u2014 they previously wrote 2012\u2019s divorce romcom Celeste And Jesse Forever, and here they have adapted Spanish filmmaker Cesc Gay\u2019s 2020 film Sentimental, in which a relentlessly argumentative married couple invite their saucy upstairs neighbours in for some meat and cheese. The big plot-point arrives about halfway through; let\u2019s just say that after a bit of wine and weed, much shit hits many fans, and there is talk of pegging.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n This is a perfectly cast film. Seth Rogen is in king-schlub mode as Joe, miserable, petulant and antagonistic, a man who has zoned out of his job, his relationship, everything, reluctantly going through every single motion. Wilde plays his quite literally buttoned-up wife Angela, desperate and flailing, dreaming of having her decor appreciated. At best, they bicker; at worst they\u2019re at each other\u2019s throats, the endlessly petty grievances amounting to depressing discord. Their loose and liberated guests are great too, Edward Norton brilliantly smug as the seemingly enlightened Hawk, and a peroxided Pen\u00e9lope Cruz gloriously unfiltered and incredibly European as P\u00edna. All four of these people are fantastically annoying. Aren\u2019t we all?<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s a real naturalism to the back and forths, the dynamic between everybody working wonders.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Wilde hems them all into this apartment, jamming them in some sort of psychological trial, where resentments, frustrations, fears and desires bubble up, boil over and get thrown in faces. It\u2019s a tonal tightrope, keeping things tense and often upsetting while never forgetting that it\u2019s a comedy \u2014 there are lots of LOLs. Here and there it is a little overcooked, the dialogue working a little too hard, and it can be zanier than necessary. Regardless, there\u2019s a real naturalism to the back and forths, the dynamic between everybody working wonders, with much overlapping dialogue and seemingly improvised ripostes. And, vicious as it is, the light finds its way in. The film wants the best for all four of them.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s all too easy to get lost in life\u2019s quagmire, and the cruelty of stagnating relationships can make for great cinema: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Before Midnight, Marriage Story. The Invite gets there too, with all its heart and soul.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n On the surface, this is a very tense and very funny comedy of manners. Underneath all that, though, is a sad, incisive, brilliantly drawn study of a failing marriage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An unhappy couple invite their sexually-enthusiastic upstairs neighbours down for dinner. With the wine and weed flowing, so too do the home truths. \u201cThe power of love\u2026 a force from above\u2026 cleaning my soul.\u201d So sang Frankie Goes To Hollywood. A beautiful sentiment it is too. Such musings dominate music, poetry, literature and cinema. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-47"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10858,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10856\/revisions\/10858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/the-invite.jpg\")
<\/div>\n\n