A24’s 'The Invite' Is Projected to Becoming One of the Best-Reviewed Films of the Year
(L-R) Penélope Cruz, Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton Credit: Courtesy of A24
Olivia Wilde's third feature was supposed to be a fun curiosity. Instead it's turning into 2026's most convincing sleeper — and the people who track these things are betting it climbs higher still.
Most people heard "Olivia Wilde directs Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton, and Seth Rogen in a dinner party comedy" and filed it away as a pleasant, forgettable diversion. The cast read like a streaming-algorithm fever dream, the logline sounded like a hundred other prestige-adjacent talk-fests, and Wilde was coming off a sophomore feature that got buried under more discourse about its set than its filmmaking. The expectations were low, and they were set that way on purpose — nothing about how The Invite arrived suggested it would be anything more than a curiosity.
The reviews are saying something very different. When we caught it at Sundance back in January, we called it a razor-sharp, emotionally intelligent marital comedy with Wilde working at the height of her powers, and gave it four and a half stars. At the time, that felt like a contrarian position — the kind of festival rave that cools off once a film hits a wider, less forgiving audience. It hasn't cooled. If anything, the opposite has happened. The wider critical consensus has spent the months since slowly arriving at the same conclusion, one review at a time, and the praise has only sharpened as more people see it.
What started as a festival sleeper has become one of the more closely watched specialty releases of the year. The gap between where the film began — modest, underestimated, easy to dismiss — and where it's landing now is the whole story, and it's a gap wide enough that even the prediction markets have taken notice. On Kalshi, the forecast for the film's eventual Rotten Tomatoes score has been ticking upward for weeks, with traders increasingly betting it climbs higher still.
The whole thing happens over one dinner
(L-R) Edward Norton, Penélope Cruz, Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde Credit: Courtesy of A24
With The Invite, Wilde delivers her most assured and emotionally fluent work to date — a chamber comedy that weaponizes intimacy, discomfort, and self-awareness to probe the slow erosion of modern marriage. Returning to a scale that foregrounds actors and language over spectacle, she crafts a film that feels rigorously controlled yet alive to the messiness of human behavior. Where Don't Worry Darling buckled under the weight of its own allegory and cultural noise, The Invite thrives on precision, trust, and restraint. Adapted from Cesc Gay's Spanish film Sentimental, the story unfolds almost entirely within a single San Francisco apartment over the course of one dinner party. Joe and Angela, a long-married couple barely holding themselves together, invite their upstairs neighbors over for an evening that quickly exposes the emotional landmines buried beneath polite conversation. It's a setup that evokes classic theatrical confrontations — Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? looms large — but Wilde resists grandstanding. She lets discomfort accumulate gradually, allowing silences, glances, and casual barbs to do as much damage as outright confrontation.
POPULAR ON THE CINEMA GROUP
Her direction is most impressive in its use of space. The apartment becomes a psychological battleground, with shifting alliances signaled through blocking and movement: who pours the wine, who retreats to another room, who dominates the couch. Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra reinforces the dynamic with frames that trap characters in doorways, mirrors, and reflections, emphasizing the performative nature of intimacy. Everyone is watching, and everyone knows it. As the evening progresses, the film pivots from social comedy into emotional excavation — old wounds resurface, resentments sharpen, and the fantasy of liberation gives way to harder truths about compromise and self-betrayal.
Rogen has never been this good
Seth Rogen Credit: Courtesy of A24
The performances are why the buzz hasn't faded. Seth Rogen is being singled out across nearly every review as giving the performance of his career. He has long excelled at playing insecurity as comedy, but here he strips away the safety net of likability entirely — Joe is petulant, defensive, occasionally cruel, and deeply recognizable, a man whose professional stagnation and physical ailments have fermented into bitterness. It's a performance that never asks for sympathy, only understanding, and it anchors the film with real emotional gravity. Wilde's Angela is his counterweight: outwardly warm and socially fluent, quietly suffocating beneath a mastery of the language of emotional intelligence. Her relentless politeness masks a dissatisfaction not just with her marriage but with the version of herself she's become inside it — a subtle, devastating turn that captures the exhaustion of someone who survives by smoothing over conflict rather than confronting it.
The arrival of Hawk and Piña, played with unnerving ease by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz, destabilizes the couple's fragile equilibrium. Norton's Hawk radiates a disarming openness that reads as either enlightened or smug depending on who's looking, while Cruz's Piña, a psychotherapist and sexologist, carries herself with quiet authority and sensual confidence, instantly becoming both object of fascination and existential threat. Together they function less as seducers than as mirrors, reflecting back the compromises Joe and Angela have made — and the lives they might have lived. Will McCormack and Rashida Jones' script is acutely attuned to the rhythms of modern communication, full of half-truths, deflections, and ironic self-awareness, conversations that overlap and veer between humor and hostility. It's the kind of across-the-board command of tone that critics tend to reward independently of one another, and that's exactly what's been happening: review after review arriving at the same conclusion.
Even the Markets have noticed
(L-R) Edward Norton, Penélope Cruz Credit: Courtesy of A24
That convergence is visible in places beyond the trade reviews. Over on Kalshi, the prediction market where users can trade on real-world outcomes, the forecast for where The Invite lands on Rotten Tomatoes has been climbing steadily since the festival and now sits north of 91 percent. The interesting part isn't the headline number — it's the shape of the betting underneath it. Traders treat a strong, well-reviewed reception as nearly settled; the odds of the film clearing the 80 and 85 marks are priced like near-certainties. What's still genuinely up for grabs is how high the ceiling goes, with the long-shot scenario of a 95-plus score carrying by far the richest payout precisely because the outcome remains in play. It's an unusual profile for a specialty release, and it reflects the kind of momentum that's hard to manufacture: a quiet film that keeps overdelivering against the expectations it arrived with.
A24's eight-figure bidding-war acquisition out of Sundance is shaping up to be one of the smartest buys of the year — a near-lock on Certified Fresh with real room to climb toward something historic. For a film that landed with low expectations and a logline that practically dared audiences to underestimate it, that's a remarkable turn, and a reminder that the quietest acquisitions are often the ones worth watching. We believed in this one in January. Everyone else is finally catching up.
Trade the Rotten Tomatoes score market for 'The Invite' on Kalshi.
Penélope Cruz Credit: Courtesy of A24
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