Olivia Wilde’s Group Sex Comedy The Invite Is Easily the Summer’s Best Film

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, widely seen as a coded gay film, a bickering pair of urbanites try to keep a terrible secret during a tense dinner party. Slowly, a third party — in the form of an inquisitive Jimmy Stewart — begins to unravel them.Olivia Wilde’s masterful The Invite is kind of like straight Rope, following San Francisco couple Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde) as they try to hide the decay at the heart of their relationship from their charismatic upstairs neighbors, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton).Except it’s not quite dinner: Joe forgot the wine, Angela burned the soufflé, and Piña is allergic to nearly all the charcuterie. Plus, it’s obvious that Joe and Angela have been fighting. The walls and ceilings are thin. So thin Joe and Angela can hear Piña and Hawk’s tantric sex noises at all hours of the night. Not that Angela would dare say anything about that. Joe on the other hand…Look, it should be clear by now that The Invite is a comedy of manners, albeit an especially suspenseful one — and when you have great actors and an excellent script (co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, based on the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs), it’s hard to mess that up. But that only makes Wilde’s direction all the more impressive, because she refuses to let the movie run on autopilot.Now on her third feature, following the 2020 queer-themed teen comedy Booksmart and the 2022 thriller Don’t Worry Darling, Wilde has hit her stride as a filmmaker, framing and blocking each actor with surgical precision throughout the chaotic evening. She allows the running conversation to breathe and constrict in quick succession, slowing down before tensing back up again, pairing each shift in tone with the brilliant Devonté Hynes score.You’ll forgive me for being effusive. It’s July and the only films to really stun me in 2026 so far are 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Blue Film, and now this, a movie I wasn’t expecting