‘The Invite’ Trailer: A24 and Olivia Wilde Host a Deliciously Awkward Dinner Party

Wilde also stars in her Sundance hit, alongside Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penelope Cruz.

Send in your RSVP now. Olivia Wilde‘s deliciously awkward and wonderfully raucous “The Invite” was the talk of the Sundance Film Festival when it debuted there earlier this year, and now it’s on its way to what should be a very eager audience.

The film sees Wilde herself starring alongside Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penelope Cruz in a comedy of manners that never lets up (and never lets that energy get in the way of some great performances). The San Francisco-set film stars Wilde and Rogen as long-married (and longer-suffering?) couple Joe and Angela, who invite their slinky new neighbors Hawk and Pina (Norton and Cruz) over for a dinner party that careens wildly (and hilariously) out of control.

At the festival, I hailed Wilde’s work here as both director and star, writing in my review, that “she knows exactly what she’s doing, how to calibrate between big laughs and broken hearts, how to use her cast to great effect, and how to surprise her audience at nearly every turn.” The film hinges on “the crackling, crazy entertaining dinner party from hell to come,” and doesn’t disappoint as it zings off in various directions, predictable and not.

The film marks Wilde’s third feature film as director (after “Booksmart” and “Don’t Worry, Darling”) and boasts a script from screenwriter duo Rashida Jones and Will McCormack (“Celeste and Jesse Forever”) based on the beloved Spanish language play and movie “Sentimental.” The film arrived at Sundance as the number one target on distributor’s list of films to potentially buy, and went on to deliver on that promise, sparking the first all-night bidding war at Sundance in years (before A24 won out). 

Wilde told IndieWire about her process, and why the film was a success outside of the studio system, during a keynote chat at the festival. “I think it just proves every single time that the movies that are made outside the system, and therefore with the freedom to allow for creative experimentation, they are always the ones that ultimately the studios end up recognizing as being valuable because those are the movies the audiences want, and we see that every year,” she said.

Making the film outside the usual confines also helped Wilde and her cast and crew find the time and space to truly experiment during rehearsals. During an interview at the festival, Norton told IndieWire, “The rehearsal was not so much a rehearsal as an infusion. It was Olivia extracting from the four of us the idea of who these people would specifically be, our version of them. It’s very unusual to be invited to create the chemistry of your characters… I think that would be some directors’ nightmare.”

The result? Already one of the best films of the year.

A24 will release “The Invite” in select theaters on Friday, June 26. Check out the film’s first trailer below.