Sundance 2026 Review: THE INVITE, Who's Afraid of Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen?

When we first meet Joe (Seth Rogen), a failed musician turned conservatory music instructor, in director Olivia Wilde’s (Don’t Worry Darling, Booksmart) superbly engaging third film, The Invite, he’s mired in a miasma of self-doubt, disappointment, and frustration.

 

Indifferently releasing his students from practice, he embarks on the train and bike-rides home from the East Bay to San Francisco, the city where he lives, if not exactly thrives, as one-half of a floundering, forty-something couple with his longtime wife, Angela (Wilde). 

 

Together, they live in an impossibly spacious, cavernous apartment, the kind of San Francisco apartment acquirable only through wealth, usually of the tech kind, or inheritance. Joe falls in the latter category, having inherited his apartment from his late parents. A point of contention, not to mention a constant reminder of his own failures as a musician, the apartment feels less like a home than a prison for Joe’s long-defunct dreams of material and professional success. No one, it seems, will ever recognize Joe’s genius as a musician or composer. 

 

For the tightly controlled, order-obsessed Angela, marriage to Joe has become an interminable slog, one filled with constant complaints (his bad back, the uncomfortable foldable bike, his general dislike for the world at large), and empty of the promises Joe explicitly made to Angela about their future together, soon after they met at one of his gigs in the distant past. 

 

It’s less a marriage based on mutual love and respect than one based on convenience and habit, their shared misery seemingly leading in one direction, divorce. Embracing, at least in part, deliberate or willful ignorance, Angela hopes a dinner party with their upstairs neighbors, Hack (Edward Norton), a retired firefighter, and Piña (Penélope Cruz), a practicing sex therapist, will help them temporarily forget their collective misery for an evening of superficially relaxing, diverting conversation. 

 

The dinner with the upstairs neighbors doesn’t go as Angela planned, of course. Refusing to set aside his miserabilism, Joe picks and prods at Angela, claiming she made plans with the upstairs neighbors without his involvement, all but promising to sabotage the evening if Angela doesn’t cancel and/or reschedule for another evening. But before they can decide one way or another, Hawk and Piña appear at their door, the latter carrying a tin of her world-famous flan and an eagerness to jump into the conversational fray (i.e., the argument they overhead from the other side of the door).

 

As Angela hilariously tries to hold the center — Wilde isn’t averse to frequent close-ups of Angela’s rapid dissolution — an angry, put-upon Joe decides on open hostility and antagonism as a course of action. Never mind that Hawk and Piña are more than aware, even hyper-aware, of the fissures running through Angela and Joe’s faltering marriage.

 

Rather than exploit those fractures, however, Hawk and Piña decide to play along, interrogating their hosts as a couple and soon thereafter, subtly separating them, Hawk pairing off with Angela as she gives him a tour of the apartment and her interior design aesthetic, as Joe and Piña abscond to his music study for a joint (it is Seth Rogen, after all) and an illuminating discussion of Piña’s background and worldview.

 

To say what happens crosses over into spoiler territory, but the title holds a clue: The Invite can be read any number of ways and not just as a dinner invitation. As new possibilities reveal themselves, so do the old hurts in Angela and Joe’s marriage, Joe’s inability to overcome perceived failures, and embrace middle-aged contentment. Alternatively, Angela, sublimating her wants and needs, finds herself with a new, not entirely unexpected opportunity for self-realization. 

 

As revelations and recriminations mount, The Invite seems headed for a final, irreversible break, but Wilde, working from Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s (Celeste & Jesse Forever) adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 comedy-drama, The People Upstairs (orig. Los vecinos de arriba), chooses an entirely different, borderline optimistic path connecting the film’s first moments to the film’s last seconds, using music as the conduit, however temporary, for a potential reconcilation. 

 

Whether Angela and Joe deserve the final moment’s literal grace notes qualifies as an issue every member of the audience will have to answer for themselves. What’s certainly clear, though, is that Wilde and her ace-level collaborators, including cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra and production designer Jade Healy, have crafted a smart, albeit slightly overlong, adult entertainment, the kind of adult entertainment all too rare in the multiplexes of today. 

 

The Invite premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.