Critic's Notebook

A24

Olivia Wilde seems drawn, as both actress and director, to narratives shaped by narcissism, fantasy, and the social hierarchies of desire. The roles she has taken on as a performer and the films she has made behind the camera often feel like variations on the same preoccupation: people trying to understand who holds power in a room, and what that power costs. Her sophomore feature, “Don’t Worry Darling,” staged that anxiety as suburban nightmare; her third directorial effort, “The Invite,” approaches it as a chamber comedy.

Adapted from Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film, “The People Upstairs,” it asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when an unhappily settled couple discovers that their impossibly attractive neighbors are having much more sex than they are?

The couple in question are Joe (Seth Rogen), a professionally and sexually frustrated stoner, and Angela (Ms. Wilde), whose patience has somehow survived both marriage and co-op living. They occupy Joe’s childhood apartment, where the walls are thin enough to transmit every renovation project and nocturnal escapade in the building. The upstairs neighbors in particular have become a kind of ambient obsession, a daily reminder that other lives appear louder, freer, and more fully lived.

Angela proposes diplomacy. Joe prefers resentment. Thus begins the titular invitation.

When the neighbors finally arrive for dinner, the film reveals its real subject: not sex but coolness. Edward Norton plays Hawk with the serene confidence of a man who appears to have reconciled himself with Tyler Durden and emerged from the experience spiritually moisturized. Beside him is Penélope Cruz’s Pina, whose effortless sensuality extends from the bedroom to the kitchen, where even a homemade flan seems to carry an afterglow. Their casual disclosure that they regularly host orgies unwittingly lands on Joe less as a proposition than as admission into an alternate social hierarchy.

They literally have Tyler Durden as their neighbor.

For Joe, the invitation is not erotic so much as anthropological: a glimpse of adulthood as it might be lived by people who are not constantly negotiating their own inadequacy. He and Angela are not simply curious about their neighbors’ sex life; they are momentarily seduced by the possibility that such ease might be transferable.

That continuity gives “The Invite” its most interesting subtext, even when the film itself struggles to sustain it.

Mr. Norton, knowingly echoing the charisma that made him such a loaded presence in “Fight Club,” turns Hawk into a middle-aged fantasy figure: a man who seems to have successfully integrated his inner Tyler Durden without losing access to civilized life. Ms. Cruz, meanwhile, supplies warmth and ease that make every scene feel briefly more alive than the film around it. Together they generate a gravitational field the rest of the movie struggles to orbit.

Unfortunately, “The Invite” proves less seductive than its premise. Despite the rapid-fire banter supplied by screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, the film often feels oddly inert, as if unsure how to translate verbal agility into cinematic momentum. The single-location setting creates intimacy, but it also produces a faint staginess, as though the film were reluctant to leave the safety of the dinner table it has constructed.

Ms. Wilde stages much of the action in functional medium shots, allowing conversation to accumulate rather than escalate. Scenes that might have tipped into comic chaos instead settle into a controlled rhythm of exchanges, the energy carefully contained rather than released. What should feel like social volatility instead feels like social observation.

Ms. Wilde’s previous work has repeatedly circled the relationship between desire and self-mythology. Here, acting in her own film, she collapses those categories into a single field of inquiry: what it looks like when control, performance, and identity become indistinguishable.