Name: The Invite
Director: Olivia Wilde
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Released: 2026-06-26
Duration: 107 min
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton

A marriage that has quietly stopped working invites the couple from the floor above to dinner, and the evening turns into the argument the hosts have spent years avoiding. That is the entire mechanism of The Invite, Olivia Wilde‘s third feature as a director: four adults, one apartment, a table laid for civility and wired for collapse.

Wilde is working from an adaptation rather than an original, and the bones of it matter. The Invite is an English-language remake of Cesc Gay’s The People Upstairs, the Spanish film the writer-director built from his own stage play, and the source lineage is visible in the architecture — close to real time, confined to a single flat, almost everything carried by dialogue and by the things four people refuse to say to each other. It is a chamber piece before it is a comedy, and the comedy is the kind that leaves a bruise.

The casting reads as an argument about register. Wilde and Seth Rogen play Angela and Joe, the hosts whose marriage is on thin ice; Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton arrive as Piña and Hawk, the upstairs neighbours whose comfort in their own skin is its own kind of provocation. Rogen, cast some distance from his usual warmth, has to hold a man’s defensiveness rather than his likeability, while Cruz and Norton supply the disruption — two performers who can make courtesy feel like a dare. The ensemble is the thesis: this is a film that lives or dies on how four people negotiate a single room.

Wilde has moved from the high-school comedy of Booksmart to the period unease of Don’t Worry Darling, and here she narrows the aperture again, trading scale for proximity. The screenplay is by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, a writing partnership with a track record in adult relationship comedy, and their instinct for dialogue suits material that asks its actors to play subtext for most of the running time. Wilde reportedly spent weeks workshopping the script with the cast before a compressed shoot, then filmed in sequence so that the performances could sour in order rather than be assembled out of it.

The play’s DNA — a single set, the unities of time and place — is exactly what draws a director to material like this and exactly what can defeat one. On a stage the form is natural; on screen, a camera trapped in one apartment has to find its movement in faces and blocking rather than in new locations. Wilde’s decision to shoot in continuity is a theatrical instinct as much as a cinematic one, treating the shoot like a run of performances and letting the actors accumulate the shared history their characters are supposed to carry into the room.

What the film is really staging is the etiquette of a long relationship — the negotiated silences, the jokes that double as accusations, the way a second couple can become a mirror nobody asked for. The neighbours function less as characters than as catalysts, present to expose what Joe and Angela have agreed not to look at directly. Gay’s original located its tension in the specifically domestic, in the bad faith of people being polite in a kitchen, and the remake’s bet is that those dinner-table pressures survive the move into English without losing their sting.

That bet is not a sure thing. Remakes of tightly wound chamber pieces have a habit of mislaying the cultural particularity that made the original cut, and an English-language version stacked with familiar faces risks swapping discomfort for star wattage — the hazard that audiences end up watching the cast instead of the marriage. The film also makes no promise to resolve what it raises; it stages a crisis and trusts a closing beat to carry the meaning, which will strike some viewers as honesty and others as a play that drops its curtain before the third act. Whether its provocations register as insight or as a well-acted exercise is precisely the question it leaves on the table.

The Invite reached audiences on the festival circuit first, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival and then travelling through Independent Film Festival Boston, the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival. The early response has been warm: the film currently holds a 91 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee describing it as a genuinely funny and uncommonly intelligent comedy for adults. That reception matters for a film working in a register — talky, single-location, adult — that the industry tends to treat as a hard commercial sell, and it suggests the remake has held onto the discomfort that made Gay’s original work rather than smoothing it for a starrier cast.

The Invite runs 107 minutes and was produced by Annapurna Pictures, FilmNation Entertainment and Permut Presentations, with A24 handling distribution in the United States. It opens in limited release in US theatres on June 26, 2026. No theatrical dates have been confirmed for most international markets at the time of writing.