Olivia Wilde's 'La invitación' Dissects a Marriage Through a Spectral Neighbor Couple

In Olivia Wilde's 2026 film La invitación, Angela (played by Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen) invite their neighbors Pina and Hawk (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton) into their apartment to complain about the couple's audible sex life, a meeting that becomes a Trojan horse for the collapse of Angela and Joe's own marriage. The neighbors function as a ghostly, archetypal projection of what the protagonists are not, echoing Tyler Durden's role in David Fincher's Fight Club (1999); the film's author likens the pair to a foundational fantasy whose invention and exhaustion sustain the relationship. Joe, a privileged and frustrated millennial who never became a musician, contains his disappointment by teaching and by smoking marijuana, while Angela sublimates her anxiety into decorating the apartment, a space she considers worthy of Architectural Digest. Pina tells them plainly, "No soy su su terapeuta," and the couple's eventual failure to consummate the sexual fantasy forces a reckoning in which blame is assigned. Pina and Hawk then fade from the apartment without explanation, leaving Angela and Joe facing their dead past; Joe returns to the piano as "Our House" by Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash plays. The review also references Kristoffer Borgli's El drama (2026), in which Zendaya and Robert Pattinson appear as Emma and Charlie in a New York diner, and cites Paul Virilio. Published by La Tempestad, the piece is illustrated with A24 film stills.