Funny as fuck, THE INVITE is arguably the funniest, wittiest, screwiest film of the year.
Reminiscent of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf with a dash of Woody Allen, THE INVITE is a lacerating comedy, a screwball farce that brings another layer of meaning to the term ‘Love Thy Neighbour’.
THE INVITE opens with a bored and disillusioned muso, now music teacher, Joe, reminiscing about earlier times in a career that seemed gloriously ascendant in grand accompaniment with his romance to Angela. As his students grind on in composition cacophony, Joe basks in aural memory of a weighted nostalgia.
Joe and Angela have been together for over fifteen years. They have a daughter but the fizz has gone out of their relationship, replaced with friction fed by Joe’s smart arse misanthrope fuelled by the couple who have moved into their apartment block and delight in mad, noisy bonking.
Just to conflate the conflict, Angela springs on Joe as he returns home from his unfulfilling work as a music teacher that she has invited the upstairs neighbours over. Pina and Hawk are childless and a lot more social, but the constant moaning and groaning coming from their apartment has become a source of arguments for Joe and Angela, arguably fuelled by a potent mix of curiosity and envy.
The invitation to the neighbours leads to another invitation from the neighbours, who become both the instigators and part of an emotional tsunami, brought on by an unusual and surprising proposal. The four neighbours can’t help but get caught up in an evening of excess and catharsis.
Seth Rogan as Joe seeps superiority, a masking mechanism to his frustration at not being a jobbing musician rather than a music teacher in a stultifying school environment. Sardonic, sneering, sarcastic and quite insufferable, his articulation is his armoury, an artillery of acerbic wit, and he projects those salvos with a precise accuracy.
Olivia Wilde as Angela stoically tries to stem her husband’s slide into the snide misanthrope that is capsizing their marriage and causing fissure in their family, but shows she is his equal zeroing in with zinger lines of cut and thrust.
As the neighbouring swinger couple, Penelope Cruz as sex therapist Pina, and Edward Norton as firefighter, Hawk, provide sublime screwball comic counterpoint.
Based on Cesc Gay’s 2021 Spanish language hit, The People Upstairs, THE INVITE is written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack and directed by Olivia Wilde, who skilfully takes a scalpel to the domestic dermal, peeling away the silt of disappointments and putting a slide under a microscope of a marriage, a Bunsen burner under the beaker of complacency, bringing all manner of emotional elements to the boil in a bubbling comic chemical reaction.
