Film Review: 'The Invite', asks, is swinging the answer to our relationship problems?
This film was always going to be on my radar — it’s about couples, sex, and one of the main characters is a psychotherapist and sexologist, played by none other than Penélope Cruz.
The whole story unfolds in one evening. Angela and Joe, (Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogan), invite the couple upstairs down for cheese, wine, (a bit of weed) and neighbourly small talk. But they’ve already built a fantasy about this enigmatic pair — Pina and Hawk (Cruz and Ed Norton) — thanks to the orgasmic noises leaking through the walls.
The contrast is stark. Angela and Joe haven’t had sex in a year — how could they, Pina asks, when they’re so mean to each other? Together two decades, they’re now locked in escalating tit-for-tat sniping, the kind of dialogue I recognise instantly from warring couples in my consulting room.
Pina and Hawk are the opposite: together less than a year, child-free, all “joy, expansion and energy.” Pina shares, without a flicker of shame, that she met Hawk as her patient (alarm bells!) and offers up lines like “sex is not something you do, it’s a place you go” — a well known Esther Perel quote.
The film’s warning is clear: don’t let the rot set in before it’s too late. But its also about the narratives and fantasies we invent about other people’s relationships — the couple next door, the parents on the school run, the loved up pair sitting next to you at a restaurant. It’s natural to wonder how other relationships are different to ours, and if they seem happier we may ask ourselves ‘what are they doing that we’re not’.
Then comes the twist: the bedroom noises aren’t only Pina and Hawk’s — they belong to play partners they have invited into their bedroom. This is a pair who enjoy hosting sex parties, and they were hoping Angela and Joe would join them in a foursome or 'swaparoo'.
After a clumsy attempt at swinging, Pina ends up conducting an impromptu therapy session for Angela and Joe. Pina asks the couple how they met. I ask this question in every initial consultation — not just for context, but to remind couples why they chose each other in the first place. This helps couples reconnect with parts of themselves and each other that they’ve lost, forgotten or buried underneath a pile of routines and domesticities.
The film opens with an Oscar Wilde quote: “One should always be in love — that is why one should never marry.” The trouble with this quote is those words “always” and “never” — pure absolutism. Relationships are more nuanced than that.
By the end of the evening Pina and Hawk disappear, almost like a mirage — perhaps because there’s something unreal about them, an idealised fantasy couple who are just too good to be true. We get a brief glimpse of cracks beneath the surface, but it doesn’t amount to much. Maybe couples like them do exist. I wouldn’t know — in my consulting room, I tend to see couples who are either in crisis or grappling with disharmony.
The final scene says it all. Joe sits at the piano for the first time in years. He’s rusty, hits a wrong note, pauses — for a moment we wonder if he’ll slam the lid shut and walk away. But he doesn’t. He plays through it, breaking that cycle of negativity and finding his way back into the flow. Angela joins him, and they share a tender moment: intimacy rebuilt through vulnerability.
That’s the true work a relationship is built upon.
So whilst swinging and having sex parties may work for some, its certainly not the only way couples can access vulnerability and intimacy. Maybe for Angela and Joe, the idea of swinging and getting close to the edge was enough for them to make their way back to each other.
