One of my favorite types of movie is the filmed play. Whether that be a literal filmed stage production, like the Hadestown film we’re finally getting in a few weeks, or something like Olivia Wilde’s The Invite. I had been hearing about The Invite since it made a big splash at Sundance earlier this year, I’d heard it compared to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (which would probably be in my all-time top 10 list if I bothered to make one) and the hype was strong for me. And as a big fan of Wilde’s Booksmart (not so much her sophomore effort Don’t Worry Darling), I was enthusiastic to see what she would do next. And not only does The Invite live up to the impossible hype I’d built up in my mind, it just might be my new favorite film of 2026. 

Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde) live in San Francisco and they’ve been together a long time. He’s a failed musician who’s now a music teacher, she stays at home raising their 12-year-old daughter. One night when the daughter is at a sleepover, Angela invites their upstairs neighbors Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pína (Penelope Cruz) over for dinner. Joe wants to confront them about all the noise coming from upstairs and Angela desperately wants to impress them and be their friend. Things escalate and begin to spiral out of control. 

The Invite is sharp and scathing, hilarious and surprising. It manages to capture the very specific thing about plays-on-film that I love – that intense feeling of claustrophobia and unease, the awkward escalating cringe factor of people who can’t find the right ways to speak to each other. But Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s electric screenplay also manages to have a lot to say about what it takes for a long-term relationship to endure. It’s cynical yet hopeful, mean yet empathetic. It’s not until the last 20-ish minutes where the tone shifts wildly and gets more serious and the movie manages to completely pull it off, that I realized I was watching something truly great. 

The Invite would also not work at all if the chemistry between the film’s four leads was not all it needed to be. Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen, a weird match on paper, are totally believable as two people who have been together a long time. The magic in their relationship has died, and they have seemingly been bickering and sparring nonstop for years. You feel the escalating tension between them and you understand the stakes and the severity of it over the film’s runtime. The film doesn’t take a side, they both make good points and they’re both kind of awful to each other. Rogen gets most of the funniest lines and Wilde, as a director, gives herself the juiciest role she’s played in years. 

Penelope Cruz has this sultry, earthy quality to her, and this is also some of the most fun she’s had with a character in a long time. And I always forget Edward Norton has this kind of comedic timing. He rarely gets the chance to be funny, and he’s great in a role like this. And the game of mental cat and mouse that goes on with these four characters escalates and gets crazier over the course of the film’s runtime. However, if there wasn’t anything real going on under all the barbs and all the snark, the last minute tonal shift into more dramatic territory wouldn’t have worked. 

Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, who won an Emmy working with Rogen on The Studio, shot this, and there’s a very distinct throwback retro kind of vibe to the way this film looks. It’s clearly shot on 35mm instead of digital, it’s got a grainy look and there are plenty of long takes that really add to the claustrophobia of it all. That brings me to production designer Jade Healy, whose work makes this film which takes place entirely within a few rooms, feel cinematic. And Devonté Hynes’ minimalist, yet very intense cello-heavy score effectively adds to the tension as it threatens to overwhelm, but never quite gets to that point. 

Olivia Wilde may have lost her way a bit with 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling, but The Invite puts her right back on track. She might be one of our most exciting directors working today and if you’d told me in the late 00s-early 2010s when Wilde was appearing in one forgettable movie after another, that I’d be saying this, I’m not sure I would’ve believed you. She’s a perfect match for the kinetic, fast paced mania of Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s screenplay. That screenplay, based on the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, is probably the best thing about this film. I’ve been a big fan of Jones, as an actor, for a long time, and it’s not surprising at all she had a script this good in her. Not only is the script consistently hilarious, it also nails the dramatic stakes that escalate over the course of the runtime. ‘Oscar nominated screenwriter Rashida Jones’ certainly has a nice ring to it.

One of my favorite things about the single-location play-on-film is the challenge it presents to the filmmaker. In this instance, you have four characters in a film set in one apartment, and not only does it need to hold the audience’s attention and keep them invested, but it also needs to ratchet up the tension and escalate the uncomfortable claustrophobia, while also not feeling like too much. And Olivia Wilde has made a film that does all of this perfectly. It’s consistently hilarious but there’s a deep underlying sense of pain and unhappiness in the lives of the people we’re following, and that makes them compelling to follow. The Invite is a perfect film for couples to see together, and should encourage a lot of fascinating conversations on the drive home, and arguments about who was right and who was wrong, and it’s also so much fun to watch in a crowded theater. The Invite will probably end up on my favorite films of 2026 list, and I can’t wait to see it again.