THE INVITE

The film opens with a brief montage of a couple, Joe and Angela (Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde), with sounds of them laughing and joking together. Cut to the present, where Joe is teaching music at a conservatory. When the lesson is over, he awkwardly pushes his bike out of the building to ride it home.

Joe and Angela have a daughter, Maggie, who is at a sleepover for the night, and they live in Joe’s family’s old house, something that he feels insecure about. Joe arrives to find Angela anxiously setting up their place because she invited their upstairs neighbors, Pina and Hawk (Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton). Angela wants to make a good impression, but Joe is preparing to confront the other couple about how loud it is when they have sex.

Pina and Hawk arrive in the middle of Joe and Angela’s bickering, but Angela assures them that everything is fine. Hawk notices a piano in the room, which belongs to Joe, but he is defensive about it being used since Joe used to play in a band before getting married. Pina is a sexologist, and Hawk says he is a firefighter, though Joe constantly refers to him as a “fireman”. Angela quickly starts to worry because they only have champagne to serve because Joe forgot to get wine, as well as Pina not eating any of the charcuterie. Joe gets out a bottle of wine meant for a special occasion.

While Joe is a bit of a dick to Pina and Hawk, they admire his brutal honesty. He excuses himself to smoke a joint, and Pina asks to join him. They end up chatting and bonding, while Hawk hangs out with Angela and discusses the house’s architecture and decorations. Pina takes a single hit of the joint and gets high quickly. She tells Joe how Hawk was a patient of hers before they started dating, and she had already been in a failed marriage. Pina also shows that she has a tattoo of two birds to represent her and Hawk.

The couples reconvene in the living room as Angela gathers tequila shots for them. Hawk finds a record of Joe’s old band, but he once again refuses to allow anyone to hear his music. Joe starts to complain about Pina and Hawk’s sex noise, which Angela tries to shut him up for, but the two are understanding over the honesty. They reveal that Joe had actually come to their apartment while they were having sex and pounded on their door to get them to shut up. Angela is embarrassed but Joe blows up over the situation.

Joe brings up a growling noise that they have heard, which brings Pina and Hawk to admit that they have group sex with their friends Kai and Vanessa, as well as various other people. Joe and Angela become curious and ask the couple about their sex parties, seemingly interested in joining. They go into full detail of the types of acts, consent, and the overall feeling of “surrendering” their bodies to people outside their relationship, as well as things that they would not do (like double penetration).

The conversation takes a turn when Hawk brings up how Angela walks in front of the window naked. Joe confronts her over this, which Angela admits doing because she enjoys being looked at. Pina chimes in and says she notices Joe looking at her breasts in the elevator when they run into each other.

Pina and Hawk admit that they did accept Angela’s invitation because they were hoping to initiate group sex with her and Joe. After some awkward back-and-forth, the couples switch partners. The mood is ruined when, after some dancing with Pina, Joe falls over and hurts his back. Hawk does a quick move to set Joe’s back in order, though he just complains about the pain. Joe starts being rude again to Hawk, mocking his real name (Howard Wilson Kelly), until Hawk reveals that he came up with the name himself after his wife passed away. Joe makes it worse by making a joke about it.

Everyone calms down after Pina blows up on Hawk for not listening to her, since she had told him that she knew Joe and Angela would not be ready for sex with them. It comes out that Joe and Angela have not had sex in over a year, bringing to light all of their personal issues like Joe’s feelings of failure in music and how it’s made Angela feel miserable as a result. She recounts the first time she and Joe met, watching him play with his band at a bar and how she ran from home to see him since she made her bad date drop her off. Pina tells the couple that they should either try their relationship over, or accept that it’s completely over instead of sticking around for Maggie’s sake. Joe and Angela both seem to agree it’s the case with the latter.

Joe and Angela privately discuss what they should do next. When they go back to the living room, they see that Pina and Hawk have already left. The couple remain quiet for the rest of the night, but Joe goes into his office and starts to play the piano for the first time in ages. Angela joins him and lays her head on his shoulder.