Movie of the Week
Olivia Wilde's remake of a Spanish film about a dinner party gone off the rails is a career high
Two couples, one dinner party — that’s the bare-bones basis of The Invite, an adaptation of the 2020 Spanish movie The People Upstairs that feels tailor-made to be franchised, translated to just about any language, and transposed onto just about any upper-middle-class milieu. France, unsurprisingly, has its take on the material; so do Italy, Switzerland, and South Korea.
Now the US of A has ours, courtesy of actor-director Olivia Wilde, and thank your respective gods that we got the one we did. (The movie opens in select theaters this weekend and goes wide on July 10.) It’s an actor-driven piece, the kind that betrays its theatrical origins and keeps the action confined to a single San Francisco apartment. Yet, like its obvious predecessors (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, God of Carnage, a century’s worth of sex farces), it benefits from a savvy ensemble who know when to goose things and when to lay off the gas pedal, as well as an extremely steady hand at the helm. There’s a version of this story that goes full wink-nudge-wink, that wrings its hands so hard over relationships it removes several layers of skin, that’s too eager to make you love some characters and feel repelled by others. But here, the alchemy of all involved produces sparks instead of snark.
