Apr 07, 2026 9:26pm IST
‘The Invite’ Trailer Review: Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen Stir Up an A24 Dinner Party Designed to Go Wrong
If A24 has built an entire subgenre around beautiful people behaving terribly in carefully designed spaces, “The Invite” looks ready to fit right in. The first trailer for Olivia Wilde’s latest directorial outing wastes no time establishing what kind of evening this is going to be.
There is a dinner table. There is a marriage that clearly needs help. There are neighbors who are a little too attractive, a little too comfortable and very obviously not here just for food. And there is Seth Rogen looking like a man who knows he is about to lose control of the room.
That is pretty much the trailer’s biggest strength; it understands the entertainment value of people making progressively worse emotional decisions in real time.
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Wilde and Rogen play a married couple whose relationship already seems to be hanging by a thread when they invite the glamorous pair upstairs, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, into their orbit. From there, “The Invite” starts teasing a cocktail of jealousy, temptation, projection and passive-aggressive unraveling. It is not exactly subtle, but it does not need to be. The fun here lies in how openly messy it seems willing to get.
What helps is that the cast instantly sells the dynamic. Rogen’s energy works well because he brings an everyman awkwardness that makes him an easy pressure point in a setup like this. Wilde appears to be leaning into a sharper, more brittle register, while Cruz and Norton have the exact kind of faces and screen presence that can make politeness feel threatening. You can already tell who in this room is enjoying the game more than the others.
The trailer also benefits from not pretending this is some grand mystery. It is not trying to hide its flirtation, discomfort or marital decay behind too much narrative fog. Instead, it seems to be banking on chemistry, escalation and the kind of adult tension that Hollywood rarely does with this much shamelessness anymore.
That said, there is always a risk with films like this. The line between deliciously uncomfortable and dramatically thin is a very real one, and “The Invite” will ultimately need more than attractive people saying loaded things over wine glasses. But as a trailer, it gets the job done.
"The Invite" is set to release in theatres in July 2026.
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