Director Olivia Wilde released her new feature film The Invitation, an American sex comedy starring Edward Norton, Penélope Cruz, and Seth Rogen, on digital streaming platforms on August 11, 2026.
The 107-minute movie follows two neighboring couples in a suburban apartment building who gather for a joint dinner that quickly devolves into an awkward proposal to engage in partner swapping and collective sexual practices.
The project is an American adaptation of the Spanish hit comedy The Upstairs Neighbors, which was originally created as a theatrical play before being brought to the screen by Catalan director Cesc Gay.
The release marks Wilde's third feature directorial effort, arriving four years after her previous project and expanding her repertoire into the realm of filmed stage plays.
Swinging neighbors and domestic friction
The narrative opens as Joe, played by Seth Rogen, arrives home exhausted after riding his folding bicycle from his job teaching music to local children.
Upon reaching his apartment, Joe seeks only to lie down on the floor, but he is met by his wife Angela, played by Olivia Wilde.
Angela explains that she ran out to purchase Spanish hamon and spent the afternoon cooking dinner to prepare for an evening with their upstairs neighbors.
Joe and Angela have suffered from sleepless nights due to terrifying roars and loud screams coming from the apartment directly above them every night.
The upstairs neighbors arrive at the apartment door precisely in the middle of a heated argument between Joe and Angela.
Hawk, played by Edward Norton, is a retired firefighter, while his partner Pina, played by Penélope Cruz, works as a professional psychologist and sexologist.
Before entering the home, Hawk and Pina stand outside the entrance and deliberately eavesdrop on the ongoing marital dispute between their hosts.
Once inside, Hawk and Pina reveal an alternative plan for the evening that goes far beyond a routine dinner party, proposing partner exchanges and group sexual activities.
The proposal forces all four characters to confront physical and emotional obstacles, ranging from Joe's chronic lower back pain to a minefield of old grievances, personal frustrations, and buried anxieties.
From stage play to international remakes
The source material for The Invitation originated in Barcelona, where playwright Cesc Gay tested and refined the comedic script on stage prior to directing the original Spanish film adaptation.
The critical and commercial success of Gay's story established the property as a candidate for international adaptations during the 2020s, drawing comparisons to Paolo Genovese's 2016 Italian hit film Perfect Strangers.
Hollywood was not the first international market to adapt the story, as Russian film producers Sarik Andreasyan and his brother produced a local remake titled Naughty Guests two years before the release of the American version.
The American screenplay was written by actors Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, who previously collaborated as co-writers on the animated feature Toy Story 4.
McCormack and Jones structured the script to distribute comedic material evenly among the ensemble, granting each of the four main cast members a dedicated solo scene and winning dialogue lines.
Director Olivia Wilde builds a star ensemble
Wilde launched her feature directing career with the 2019 high school comedy Booksmart, followed by the 2022 feminist dystopian thriller Don't Worry Darling.
During the filming of Don't Worry Darling, Wilde replaced actor Shia LaBeouf with pop musician Harry Styles following on-set conflicts, subsequently forming a high-profile personal relationship with Styles.
Throughout her directing career, Wilde has established a reputation for assembling prominent cast members while maintaining a distinct directorial presence across varying cinematic genres.
The production team for The Invitation features cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, who previously worked on the acclaimed television series The Bear and the comedy series The Studio.
The musical score was composed by producer and cellist Devonté Hynes, performing under his stage name Blood Orange, whose cello arrangements playfully incorporate musical quotes from Georges Bizet's nineteenth-century opera Carmen.
Acting choices and narrative structure
The narrative unfolds across three distinct acts structured like a stage play, with the first two acts focusing on the characters introducing themselves, unwinding, and flirting over drinks.
In a review for Russian news outlet Lenta.ru, film critic Yaroslav Zabaluev noted that the dynamic reflects modern attention deficit issues rather than explicit alternative lifestyle practices.
Zabaluev observed that the visual pacing attempts to balance short-form video aesthetics with the claustrophobic tension found in Roman Polanski's 2011 film adaptation Carnage.
Assessing the cast performances, Zabaluev wrote that Wilde overacts in her role as Angela, conveying facial expressions suggesting an impending stroke rather than a nervous breakdown.
Rogen relies on his trademark coarse delivery and deep baritone voice, while Cruz portrays Spanish personality traits so intensely that her blonde character with dark eyebrows takes on an unintentionally Armenian quality.
Norton provides the quietest performance in the group, allowing his character Hawk to develop slowly and deliver the central monologue during the story's dramatic climax.
Feminist perspective and Oscar Wilde influences
Zabaluev criticized the directorial execution of the climax, stating that despite Wilde's identity as a feminist filmmaker, the movie contains little evidence of a distinct female gaze.
The review noted that while Cruz maintains an ironic distance from her role, Wilde attempts to frame Angela's domestic strain as a classic American stage tragedy in the style of playwright Edward Albee's 1962 drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
As a result, Norton's dramatic monologue stands as a solo performance where the other actors politely pause, rather than serving as a transformative turning point for the narrative.
The film opens with an epigraph from nineteenth-century Irish author Oscar Wilde, stating that a person must always be in love and should therefore never marry.
Director Olivia Wilde, whose birth name is Olivia Cockburn, chose her stage surname in homage to Oscar Wilde and holds dual American and Irish citizenship.
Zabaluev concluded that while Oscar Wilde argued that explicit moralizing damages artistic beauty, the film repeatedly attempts to extract practical moral lessons, taking Wildean titles such as The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband too literally.
