The Invite — The Predators Wear Nice Sweaters

Four people, one apartment, one evening, and the year’s most pleasurable proof that the mid-budget adult comedy still has a pulse.

They invite the neighbors up for a drink mostly to stop wondering about them. That is the whole inciting incident, and it is the most recognizable thing a movie has done to me this year: the small social itch that makes a person open his own door to people he has otherwise only nodded at in a hallway. Olivia Wilde knows the itch is the danger. Four people, one apartment, one evening, and every courtesy extended across the next hundred and seven minutes turns out to have a hook in it.

Joe and Angela are the hosts, Seth Rogen and Wilde, a marriage that has reached the stage where the shared jokes are doing structural work. The neighbors are Pina and Hawk, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton, and they arrive the way certain couples arrive, as an event, as weather, as a mirror nobody asked to look into. The film comes from a Spanish chamber piece and the theatrical bones show in the best way, the unities holding pressure in like a lid on a pot. Nobody can leave without it meaning something, so nobody leaves, so the evening keeps having to find somewhere new to put its hostility. What the transposition adds is a very American strain of self-narration: people who have podcasts about their feelings and a vocabulary for their dysfunction and no working idea what they want. The comedy lives in that gap, and the film never once has to point at it.

All four are operating at a level that made me giddy. Rogen is the one everybody will talk about, and they should. He has hardened his usual warmth into something wounded and watchful, a man whose punchlines are load-bearing walls, and his readings carry years of backstory the script never states. Cruz takes the part that could have been the exotic free spirit and refuses the cliche outright, playing Pina as a woman whose openness is a discipline rather than a quirk. Wilde hands herself the least showy role and plays it with real intelligence, the host whose smile is working overtime, tracking the room even while she is the one talking. And Norton. It has been a long time since a movie knew what to do with Edward Norton, that specific gift for making superiority magnetic and then letting you catch the flop sweat underneath it, and this one deploys him like the instrument he is. Watching the four of them pass scenes around is the pleasure of the thing. It is a doubles match, and everybody holds serve.

Two things do go wrong, and neither is what the film keeps getting accused of. The score is busier than four actors this good require, underlining exchanges they had already scored themselves. And there is a stretch in the final movement where the knives get swapped for speeches and the picture goes misty in a way the first hour would have smirked at; I could have lived with one fewer monologue, and the film would be a half-step tighter for it. The accusation I keep hearing, though, is that these are joke delivery systems rather than people, and that one mistakes the subject for the flaw. Of course they are brittle and bitty and over-rehearsed. They are performing versions of themselves at each other all night, because that is what couples do in front of other couples, and the performance is the only thing any of them has practiced. The shtick is the characterization. The movie is about the moment it slips, and when it slips, in two late scenes I will not spoil, the faces underneath are recognizable enough that the sentiment lands as relief rather than surrender.

The direction was always going to be the referendum here, because I have never known which Olivia Wilde would show up: the one who trusts a room, or the one who is pleased with herself. This is the first, unmistakably. She shoots the apartment like a fifth character, all sightlines and escape routes, the kitchen a confessional, the balcony a demilitarized zone, the front door visible in just enough shots to keep reminding you that leaving is technically an option. And she has the confidence to hold a two-shot and let discomfort cook instead of cutting to safety, which is the whole ballgame in a picture like this. That is the filmmaker her debut promised and her second picture buried under discourse. There is no discourse here. There is craft, and appetite, and a room of adults being witty and cruel and eventually honest with each other, which turns out to be the most transgressive thing a comedy can put on screen in 2026.

A movie like this used to be the reason you went out on a Friday. Come for the ugly feathered spectacle elsewhere this summer; come here for the other kind of creature feature, the one where the predators wear nice sweaters and compliment your shelves. It is the funniest film of the year so far, it contains four performances I will still be arguing about in December, and it settles my Olivia Wilde question for the time being. When she is on, she is really on. Invite accepted.