Rogen Anchors "The Invite" Dinner-Party Comedy
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- The Invite stars Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde (who also directs) as a married couple hosting a fraught dinner with neighbors played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, in a film the reviewer calls a "four-way sex comedy of embarrassment" with a "bizarrely moving" payoff.
- The film is adapted from the Spanish movie The People Upstairs by Cesc Gay, which was itself based on a stage play; a Korean remake of the original Spanish film has already been produced, signaling the premise's export appeal.
- Rogen plays Joe, a failed musician turned minor-college music teacher living in his late parents' apartment and suffering from depression and a psychosomatic bad back; Wilde's Angela, by contrast, engineers the dinner ostensibly to apologize for renovation noise — while Joe silently nurses a grudge about the neighbors' loud sex.
- The reviewer flags an oppressive early choice to punctuate almost every line of dialogue with a musical score, but notes the mannerism fades as the film settles and Rogen's comedy takes over.
- The film is compared to Roman Polanski's four-hander Carnage (2011) and Francis Veber's Le Dîner de Cons (remade as Dinner for Schmucks with Steve Carell), placing it in a tradition of confined-cast bourgeois-dinner embarrassment comedies.
- The review concludes that the movie is "broad, stagey and contrived" with sudden mood shifts, but Rogen is "on top of his game" and the film is ultimately "funny."
Why it matters: For audiences weighing the film, the review's central verdict is that Rogen's performance carries a deliberately theatrical, sometimes overcaffeinated premise — the cast is the asset, not the script. The adaptation pedigree (Spanish stageplay → Spanish film → Korean remake → English-language version) suggests a proven exportable format, but the reviewer judges the execution more contrived than, say, Polanski's "Carnage," making this a Rogen-fan pickup rather than a must-see for the subgenre.
