Olivia Wilde’s Foursome Is an Expertly Crafted, Bitingly Hilarious Recreation of Marital Jenga

When you’ve lived in any metropolis, anyplace, you have in all probability had the expertise of listening to your neighbors have intercourse. Relying on how safe you might be in your personal relationship, you could find yourself questioning when you’ve ever had an orgasm fairly just like the one you are presently listening to by way of the partitions. When was the final time my accomplice made like to me like that? With out solely auditory support to go off of, it may be simple to imagine the grass is greener upstairs.

If, like Joe and Angela (Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde, respectively), you are already on the finish of your marriage’s ropes, and you have not touched one another in, say, a full calendar yr, the sound of intercourse can really feel threatening. Like mockery, even. It might even be the ultimate domino that ends your decaying partnership.

Tailored by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack from the Spanish movie The Individuals Upstairs by Cesc Homosexual, The Invite is a magnetic, acerbically humorous, romantic nightmare within the vein of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. It was by no means a doubt that this explicit foursome of actors may maintain the ball so excessive up within the air, however what actually mesmerizes is Wilde’s crisp and meticulous path. The Invite is like watching a recreation of Jenga, if the 4 characters had been the highest layer and every part beneath them was a torrent of bitterness and lies.

The movie could also be Sundance’s finest comedy of the competition, in addition to its most incisive exploration of marriage and intercourse. At its finest, it performs like a Neil Simon play or John Cassavetes’s jazzy movie improvisations. It’s also at all times stupefying. It conquers that nice mountain that each movie aspires to be: each inevitable and shocking on the similar second. It definitely is shocking for Joe, a music instructor at a group school in California’s East Bay, who comes house sooner or later to search out that his spouse has gone fully overboard in preparation for a double-date dinner he had, seemingly, no thought was occurring.

The desk has an enormous meat and cheese board, there is a new Persian rug, she’s carrying new garments; Joe, in the meantime, is insistent the plan was by no means made. Cue a rapidly escalating struggle packed stuffed with absurdly hilarious barbarisms and plain previous imply jabs. Joe is pissed off on the incessant intercourse noises whereas Angela is clearly turned on by it; Joe threatens to deliver it up at dinner. The bombastic struggle doesn’t finish a lot as (briefly) pause on the arrival of Hawk and Pina (Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz, respectively).

The upstairs neighbors appear to be every part they don’t seem to be: affected person with one another, flirtatious, courteous. They’re additionally romantically aggressive. It’s by no means clear if Hawk is purposefully making sexual puns or if it simply seems like that to an already on-alert Joe. Nonetheless, the night continues, and the mere presence of this odd however comfortable couple solely exacerbates an already tough patch of communication for the hosts.

Wilde makes the distinctly poor communication cinematic by persistently framing her characters in off-centered reflections in mirrors and window panes, or else barely eliminated by way of door jambs and archways. Composed with a wrenching string rating by Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange, this four-person chamber drama escalates in taut rigidity as an increasing number of secrets and techniques are revealed, and deeper insults are flung. All of it’s all the extra highly effective due to the labyrinth that Wilde’s path and Hynes music creates. Characters are paired off, re-united and thrown at one another with alacrity. The residence feels each countless and cramped.

What they study their upstairs neighbors, and what they study their hosts, constantly amplifies every character’s hang-ups, needs and agonies. Hawk’s very title appears to problem Joe’s masculinity, which is not helped when he learns that he is a former firefighter. Pina is a psychotherapist and sexologist. It is like they’ve tapped their neighbor’s telephones.

Like an accordion, Joe and Angela are pulled aside and again collectively and aside once more again and again as every dialog and every glass of wine is re-filled and every joint is re-lit. The night is a practice wreck, however, elegantly, Wilde, who additionally turns in one in every of her finest performances of her profession, lets the mud settle in a beautiful and tender method. Marriage will be great; it will also be tough. It might generally be each on the similar time. What makes The Invite in the end so particular is its unabashed honesty, even when it means doom. Like a fancy symphony, it will probably, and will, hit all of the notes.

The Invite screened on the 2026 Sundance Movie Competition.