“The Invite” Is a Witty Relationship Comedy That Could Be Wilder

Wilde’s previous feature, the dystopian thriller “Don’t Worry Darling” (2022), was a through-the-looking-glass nightmare of nineteen-fifties-style suburbia whose visual conceits felt thuddingly obvious; nearly every shot screamed “Danger!” so loudly that you couldn’t help but search for the exit. “The Invite” is a more compressed, disciplined affair—a return to the dexterous wit of her début, the teen comedy “Booksmart” (2019). But even here, Wilde’s stylistic choices can veer from shrewd to overly studied. The apartment, though no one’s idea of a fun house, is bedecked with mirrors, and, early on, the cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra uses them to splinter the couple’s every argument into fragments. A reflective shot might juxtapose two Angelas and one Joe, or isolate one spouse in the foreground and the other in the mirror behind them. The effect is distracting yet apt: at no point are husband and wife fully inhabiting the same plane.

Musically, too, the movie tends toward the overwrought; the score, by Dev Hynes, is so awash in ominously thrumming cello strings you might wonder if the term “chamber piece” has been taken literally. And yet Joe and Angela’s animosity is underscored by an absence of song. No one is allowed to play Joe’s one-hit-wonder record, or to touch the piano that now gathers dust in his office. Only when Hawk and Piña finally show up, interrupting Joe and Angela mid-argument, does anyone dare to break this rule—or to suggest that another kind of beautiful music might yet be made.

In the annals of double-date-from-hell movies, “The Invite” is neither as good as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), Mike Nichols’s still crackling adaptation of Edward Albee’s play, nor as bad as “Carnage” (2011), Roman Polanski’s mirthless film version of Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage.” As it happens, Wilde’s movie is a redo of a Spanish comedy, “The People Upstairs” (2020), which the director and screenwriter Cesc Gay adapted from his own stage work. Gay’s movie has already spawned Italian, Swiss, French, and South Korean remakes, though “The Invite” is the first to honor its lineage by casting a Spanish actor as one of its principals—either that, or it was simply and wisely decided that no one but Penélope Cruz could play Piña. A psychotherapist and a sexologist, she styles her hair in a fetching mass of blond locks and dark roots, and sweeps into the apartment with a suave self-assurance that reduces Angela to even more of a stammering wreck. (Wilde is a terrific director of actors, herself included.) When the subject turns, inevitably, to Piña’s high-volume sex life, she makes a heartfelt apology but couldn’t seem less embarrassed; in her eyes, we see a matter-of-fact merriment, plus a glimmer of naughty intent. She is, on paper, the character who drifts closest to caricature—the hot-blooded Euro-chic seductress—and yet, onscreen, she’s the one figure the movie can’t bring itself to mock. She knows herself too well, and is too comfortable in her skin, to make ridicule an option.

Hawk is another story. We initially take our cues from Joe, who can’t stand the guy and doesn’t buy his ludicrous name, his insistent friendliness, his patronizing New Age sensitivity, the fact that he used to be a firefighter. Hawk lays everything on a touch too thick, whether he’s praising Angela’s taste in rugs or even complimenting Joe’s brutal honesty. (“We love a contentious environment,” Hawk declares, by way of either defusing or aggravating the evident tension between his hosts.) Norton, like few other actors, can turn on the charm and the smarm as if they were side-by-side faucets, and what’s disarming about the performance is the way he keeps twisting the taps—flooding us with decency one moment, reverting to smug insufferableness the next. All in all, though, Piña and Hawk’s arrival is a relief; despite untold opportunities for fresh awkwardness and turmoil, the film seems more at ease in the company of guests. The camera steadies itself, the strings and mirrors take a break, and you can sense Wilde’s confidence in her material growing. It’s as if the movie itself grasps that four is better than two—a lesson that has a very specific application where the characters are concerned.

Read no further if you wish to preserve the purity of the viewing experience, but Wilde’s film is at its fleeting best in the realms of the impure. Piña and Hawk, we learn, like to host group-sex parties, and it is they, not Angela, who end up extending the invite of the title. The fallout of that inquiry—to which Joe and Angela gamely acquiesce—generates its share of laughs, though our amusement comes at a cost. A sudden swerve into experimental terrain is just as swiftly preëmpted by some predictable slapstick and a fresh round of couples therapy—all so that, in the end, the threat of polyamory can be banished, the blessings of monogamy reasserted, and Oscar Wilde’s disdain for marriage decisively disproved. The closing moments are sweet and poignant; they also suggest a failure of nerve. I’m not saying “The Invite” needed an orgiastic climax—only that it might have benefitted, like any relationship, from less fidelity to a preëxisting script, and perhaps a drop more of its characters’ own courage. What happens onscreen isn’t just coitus interruptus; given how quickly the neighbors quit the premises, it’s more like a premature evacuation. ♦