The Invite Review

Cesc Gay's play and his 2020 film The People Upstairs have been remade in several countries, and this American version, scripted by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, gives the premise a starry cast. Seth Rogen's Joe is a jazz teacher who has stopped playing, Olivia Wilde's Angela wants the evening to go well, and their guests, Penélope Cruz's therapist and sexologist Pina and Edward Norton's Hawk, are the source of the noise through the ceiling. They have come to dinner with a proposal.

Shot on 35mm in 23 days, in story order, it plays like the stage piece it descends from. The pleasure is the four actors: Rogen's bluntness curdling into hostility, Cruz's clinical calm, and a monologue about Hawk's name that Norton wrote himself, with Rogen's reply improvised. When the film has to resolve the night's damage, the writing loses its nerve a little.

After a Sundance premiere in January 2026 and a bidding war won by A24, it opened in limited release on June 26 and went wide on July 10. Reviews were excellent, 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 82 on Metacritic, with Owen Gleiberman at Variety invoking Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, while Vulture's Bilge Ebiri felt its emotional turns were not fully earned. It grossed 55.7 million dollars on a 15 million dollar budget.