Film Review - The Invite (2026)

The Invite is the new film by Olivia Wilde and she and Seth Rogen play a married couple who are hosting their neighbours (Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz) for a dinner party one night but when people sit around having had too much to eat and drink some dinner parties can go badly wrong.

I was looking forward to this movie because I really like Olivia Wilde as a director, Booksmart in 2019 was a very enjoyable while 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling was well directed and had great visuals but was let down by a bad script that didn’t really commit to its ideas as well as I had hoped but could she get back on form or was Don’t Worry Darling a sign to Worry about her as a director.

Well sadly this movie was a disappointment for me but Wilde’s work once again did not, she is a woman of many talents and does a great job both in front of and behind the camera, the way she uses the camera to frame the characters, make the apartment setting feel lived in and like a character in and of itself is really good and Wilde does a great job with her staging and camerawork as well as playing Angela the hostess who is clearly not happy with how things have gone.

Plus Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz deliver good work as the upstairs neighbours invited to the dinner party and Cruz in particular is really good in her moments as well plua the film has a lot of good laughs in it throughout that made me laugh more than once.

But the big problem for me was that I hated these people, Angela and Joe (Rogen’s character) spend a lot of the movie arguing with each other which is never a good sign when you have guests coming over and all 4 of these people felt like the kind of guests you visit at their dinner party (perhaps Angela and Joe needed the Australian sketch comedy The Late Show’s guide to hosting a dinner party) but after a while (and a few drinks) the whole thing descends into a slanging match between the guests and you just want to leave and go home and that was how I began to felt as the film went on.

What also didn’t help is that Seth Rogen once again plays an insufferable bastard that you just get sick of watching after a while and I just don’t like him as an actor I’m sorry to say, it just feels like he plays the same loser type character who smokes joints over and over again and I just got sick of it as the film went on and when it was over I was happy to leave the cinema.

And so that was the Invite and like Backrooms this was a letdown for me, it has good laughs/good performances and good direction by Wilde but this is one dinner party I was happy to leave, 2 and a half out of 5.