“It’s a love letter to Mike Nichols,” director Olivia Wilde declared before the IFFBoston closing night screening of The Invite, setting the audience in the right frame of mind. The Invite represents both the best of what fellow diractor Nichols was great at and a genuine step up for Wilde as a filmmaker. Both Nichols and Wilde are talented actor-directors who take on the challenge of directing other peoples scripts, and, in The Invite (a remake of Cesc Gay’s Spanish film The People Upstairs) Wilde has found her her Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Wilde’s film is a genuine throwback to the type of film we don’t see much of anymore in theaters. Not even to mention the chutzpah that the movie has to corine into becoming a rendition of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, similarly hilarious and honest.
The Invite centers around Joe (Seth Rogen, in a career-best performance that made me think of Jack Nicholson) and Angela (Wilde herself), a married couple of several years whose relationship has been on the rocks for some time. Joe’s a math teacher whose failure in his own life leads him to take out frustrations on others. Angela, meanwhile, is a stay-at-home mom whose micromanagement around their (already beautiful) apartment leads to tension in other parts of their marriage. Angela invites over their neighbors, Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penelope Cruz), on a whim, testing her and Joe’s intentions with the other couple. Wilde’s chamber drama spends a lot of time deftly exposing the characters’ quirks and drawing us into their obsessions. For example, Joe is curious as to why Hawk and Pina have such noisy sex upstairs (you can see he’s a little envious, even though he’s irritated about being awakened up in the middle of the night). But it’s the social dynamics that are either ready to be broken or upheld with Angela’s refusal to confront them or Joe’s eagerness to.
I loved The Invite, easily Wilde’s crowning achievement. The way in which Wilde handles the dynamic script feels like she’s been waiting for something like this for her entire career, both as an actor and filmmaker. It’s probably her best work as an actor; she doesn’t play Angela as manic, but rather clearly struggling to fix a broken marriage. One glass of champagne (she forgot wine) and she feels like a new woman with new people to entertain. There’s genuine thrill from all involved with how we learn Pina and Hawk can improve their sex life. But so much of what’s revealed from Joe and Angela isn’t how they heal; it’s how they fight. It’s the most fun version of a dialogue between these characters, teetering on the edge of self knowing. No less indulgent is the insistence of the score by Blood Orange, which only heightens already uncomfortable conversations. All that is beautifully mirrored by how the actors themselves play off each other, and how Wilde has grown into an even better actor-director.
I had the chance to speak with Olivia Wilde prior to The Invite‘s local premiere as the closing night film of the 2026 Independent Film Festival Boston. She spoke on the collaboration that lead to the movie, the connections to her previous films, and what’s it’s like to direct herself.
BOSTON HASSLE: I was going through your career, because you’ve worked with so many great people– Joe Kosinski, Clint Eastwood, Spike Jonze– but I specifically thought about Drinking Buddies, and I was curious if you had thought about that with the Joe Swanberg quality of The Invite, and how they pair during production.
OLIVIA WILDE: I think working on Drinking Buddies was the first time I took myself seriously as a storyteller who could potentially direct a film, because Joe, through his process, is so inclusive. The nature of improvising a script based on an outline is very trusting, in terms of involving the actors and kind of trusting their instincts, and I don’t think I had been trusted like that before. Drinking Buddies [gave me] the feeling of being able to help craft the narrative and make choices that then ultimately made a story that worked, and the audience responded to it. It gave me an enormous amount of confidence, like maybe I do know how to tell a story– maybe I could do this!
His process definitely inspired me in terms of this movie, because we were a team telling the story together. We shot [The Invite] in order, which none of us had ever done before. That’s obviously something that’s usually logistically impossible, but we were in one location, so why not? We shot on 35 millimeter, which meant everyone had to really make choices and be confident in those choices, because it wasn’t as though we had endless reels of film to be able to just kind of meander through the process. So it was this high stakes, incredibly fun, interesting, engaging process.
BH: I did see Seth Rogen, to that point, say that this was like working with friends, and you do get that sense. Was that your job also, subconsciously or consciously, as a filmmaker? Because I think you do get that sense in your previous movies, that these are people that have been together for a number of years.
OW: I think that one of the core jobs of a director is relaxation, being able to make everyone feel safe enough to relax and play. It’s kind of like hypnosis; you’re hypnotizing people to believe they are other people in an alternate universe.
BH: I was wondering also if there’s an adjustment there with directing yourself in a movie?
OW: It’s like, okay, you’re one of the four now. [I wanted to say to someone] “Was that, like, okay?” It was definitely thanks to my scene partners that acting in this film felt really fluid. It didn’t scare me in the way that I think I probably would have assumed, [that] it would be a very difficult thing to take on. I actually found it to be probably the most joyful acting experience of my life. I always liken it to playing on the NBA All Star team. It’s like somehow something went wrong, and I ended up on the team! [But] they make it pretty easy to play basketball.
BH: Yeah– they’ll pass you the ball, you could throw it anywhere, and they’ll probably catch it. Any connections between this script and Don’t Worry Darling or Booksmart?
OW: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the through line through the three films is relationships, right? And conflict, and duos. All three films are about a relationship coming to a point of combustion for different reasons, and the idea of not necessarily thinking you know everything about the person you love, but can you wear it really right? And what do we hold back exactly?
The Invite
2026
dir Olivia Wilde
107 min.
Opens Friday, 7/3 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre and Friday, 7/10 @ Somerville Theatre
