Cheap Movie Tuesday: The Invite (2026)
Not my kind of party, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't go.
The Invite is based on Cesc Gay’s ‘The People Upstairs’, a Spanish film released in 2020. I haven’t seen it, I hadn’t even heard of it before watching ‘The Invite’ but something about that film really connects with audiences. In just six years it has been remade five times, first in Italy, then Switzerland, then France, then South Korea and finally in the USA where it has been retitled ‘The Invite’.
Why is the appeal so vast?
The plot in 1 sentence: A long married, complacent couple invite their eclectic neighbors over for dinner. Chaos ensues.
Sounds like the premise for an episode of a 20th century sitcom. But there’s probably more to it than that, right?
The larger plot: Fred Flintstone Joe (Seth Rogan) is a middle-aged angry old man trying to lose weight by biking to work.
Joe lives in San Francisco (remember this) so the bike ride involves a lot of punishing hills. When he gets home, he’s so tired he has to lie down on the floor.
But his wife, Wilma, Angela (Olivia Wilde) tells him he has to get up because the people who live upstairs are coming over for dinner.
That makes Joe angry because everything does he doesn’t like the upstairs neighbors. They keep having loud and crazy sex at 4 AM, making it impossible for Joe to sleep.
But Angela is a sound sleeper and she finds the upstairs neighbors charming, particularly Pina (Penélope Cruz) who is from Spain and has admirable taste in both fashion and home decoration.
This makes Joe even angrier so he threatens to confront Pina and her beau about the noisy coitus.
The door bell rings.
Pina enters with her partner, Hawk (Edward Norton). Hawk acts like he wants to be Joe’s new best friend but the offer sounds insincere and condescending. Naturally, this makes Joe mad and things aren’t off to a good start.
It gets worse when Angela proudly offers her guests expensive charcuterie and Pina reveals that she’s a gluten-intolerant vegan who has cut sugar out of her diet.
Hawk eats meat though. He also notices how hurt Angela is when Joe mocks her for spending money on food Pina can’t eat. Hawk takes Angela aside, where he reveals that it is he, not Pina, who has the interior decoration skills Angela greatly admires. Then Hawk offers to be Angela’s new best friend, he sounds sincere this time.
Meanwhile, Pina takes Joe aside because she heard he likes to smoke pot and so does she. They bond over a joint. As he begins to relax, Joe defaults to criticizing Angela. Surprisingly, Pina joins in and soon they’re both laughing at the expense of the person who planned this party.
Eventually everyone winds ups in the same room again and…..
Joe decides to confront his neighbors about their horny wailing. Pina and Hawk apologize and go onto explain that they’ve both recently decided to explore swinging and that the noise keeping Joe up at night is never generated by two people, but groups that can be as large as ten.
Pina and Hawk accepted Angela’s invitation to dinner because they want to invite Angela and Joe to participate. Hawk seems to want Angela to accept, even if it means Joe comes too. Pina seems to be asking because she knows they’ll both decline, which they do, but only after a long, drawn out sob session where they admit to no longer loving each other.
The Invite is an interesting movie, one that feels like both a success and failure.
Let’s get the criticism out of the way. Pina and Hawk are both hippy-dippy caricatures, both characters are in the film solely to cause reactions, not to represent any realistic human behavior. Norton leans into this and plays for laughs, Cruz tries to find something deeper and does as well as she can under the circumstances.
Joe’s character is the most fleshed out. We learn the source of his anger was being in a band that was initially successful but quickly fell apart. Joe has spent much of the past two or three decades bitter about being ‘robbed’ of the rockstar life he wanted. He would never admit this, because he was worried it would make him look pathetic. So he kept the rage in and gradually degenerated into the miserable, but very believable, character in this film.
Unfortunately, it’s also mentioned that a big source of Joe’s shame is inheriting his San Francisco home rather than buying it with money he earned himself.
That really took me out of the moment. I wound up thinking about other things like:
Imagine a character ashamed of being naturally beautiful, rather than from plastic surgery paid for by money he earned himself.1
Why is this movie set in San Francisco? Nobody can afford to live there except software designers and Tommy Wiseau. How could they even afford to film this in San Francisco?2
Can you believe San Francisco was once a liveable city? What do you suppose was the last movie that took place in those liveable times. Basic Instinct, maybe?
(Sigh) Anyway…
Olivia Wilde gives the movie’s best performance. We never learn much about Angela, other than she yearns for a life larger and happier than the one Joe continuously tries to keep small and miserable.
Wilde’s performance adds a lot. It’s strange how bad you feel for Angela when Pina refuses to eat the food she prepared. That sort of scene is a sitcom punchline, but through Wilde’s expressions we see that Angela was hoping the food would somehow get her invited into a better life than the one she has.
The Invite won’t entertain people expecting the dialogue and wit you’d find in a film with a Mike White or Greta Gerwig screenplay. But, if the sadness of a dying marriage resonates with you, you’ll find much to connect with here.
The Tea: Put those cups away, this occasion calls for wine. Put that Riesling away too, we need something strong and bitter! Shiraz. The Invite pairs well with Shiraz.
The Snack: If you ever wanted permission to set up a table full of prosciutto, fine cheeses, fresh fruit, fresh bread and delicious pastries but only so you could eat it all yourself, here is a movie that gives you permission to do that.
On second thought, there might be people ashamed of that.
They mostly couldn’t. Two days of this movie’s production were shot in SF, the rest was shot in a LA studio.
I remember rewatching Basic Instinct last year and all I could think about was the real estate nostalgia. A cop and an academic being able afford large apartments downtown seemed even crazier than Sharon Stone’s character, and her beach house will forever haunt me as the most desirable and unattainable piece of real estate in the entire Bay Area