The soufflé is already in the bin. Angela, the host, had hoped to impress, but the dish collapsed somewhere between the oven and the table, and now she is offering jambon to a guest who has just announced she is vegetarian. The guest, Pina, smiles with a sangfroid that only deepens the awkwardness. Her partner, Hawk, watches with an elliptical calm. Upstairs, their bedroom antics have been keeping Angela and her husband Joe awake for weeks; tonight, the four of them are finally face to face, and the evening is already tilting from dinner party into something less manageable. This is the opening movement of The Invite, a film that confines its action almost entirely to a single apartment and lets the clink of wine glasses give way to the sound of a marriage being dismantled in real time.

The film, directed by and starring Olivia Wilde, is the fifth screen adaptation of Sentimental, a play by Spanish writer Cesc Gay that has already been remade in several languages. This English-language version assembles a conspicuously international cast: Wilde and Seth Rogen as the fraying San Francisco couple, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton as the neighbours whose bohemian ease exposes every crack in their hosts’ relationship. Cruz, the most recognisable Spanish actress in the world, did not appear in the original Spanish film; instead, she brings what Russian critic Anton Dolin describes as an exaggerated Iberian sensuality to the Hollywood retelling, a choice that sharpens the contrast with the nervous, clenched energy of the American pair. The film’s geography is deliberately claustrophobic—ninety-five per cent of it unfolds inside the apartment—but its cultural coordinates are scattered across continents.

Viewed from Sydney, the film lands as a welcome corrective. Australian reviewers note that while European and other foreign industries have been producing sophisticated adult relationship comedies for years, Hollywood has been dominated by visual-effects-driven superhero narratives. The Invite, in this reading, is part of an effort to reclaim a space for grown-up chamber pieces. From São Paulo, the anticipation was tangible: a mid-morning screening on a Tuesday drew a full house, according to Brazilian reports, suggesting an appetite for comedy that does not rely on set pieces but on the slow burn of overlapping dialogue and passive-aggressive silences. Norton, speaking to Brazilian press, offered a key to the film’s deeper architecture, explaining that his and Cruz’s characters are not simply the enviable, sexually liberated couple they first appear to be. Both have passed through their own versions of crisis—divorce, bereavement—and have chosen to disarm, to live lightly. The dinner, then, is not a collision of opposites but a mirror held up to different stages of the same long struggle.

Indian critics, however, were less convinced. While acknowledging the film’s brutally funny moments and its debt to forebears like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Roman Polanski’s Carnage, they found that the second half loses momentum, that the couple run out of ways to insult each other, and that the segue into therapeutic confession undermines the sharper edges of the premise. This divided response mirrors the film’s own central tension: the gap between the fantasy of reinvention and the reality of accumulated grievances. The epigraph, borrowed from Oscar Wilde—the director’s namesake—declares that one should always be in love, and therefore never marry. Yet the film itself, as Dolin notes, seems to find the aphorism slightly expired, more a provocation than a truth.

The lasting image is not of a dramatic blow-up but of a quiet inversion. At some point in the evening, the hosts realise they are no longer the ones extending an invitation; the guests have, without moving, become the hosts of a different kind of gathering. The dinner table, strewn with abandoned plates and half-empty glasses, resembles a crime scene where nobody has died but everyone is bruised. It is an image that lingers precisely because it refuses to offer a verdict—only the uncomfortable recognition that the most revealing conversations often happen when the soufflé has already been thrown away.