By Jason Osiason

The Invite has all the right ingredients but I found it a little selfish for it to fully work. The film unfolds almost entirely in a single apartment and plays like a chamber piece about a marriage quietly collapsing. Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen play a couple sitting on the bridge of falling apart while the glamorous neighbors next door, played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz, host loud, uninhibited sex that begins to feel like both temptation and escape. The premise is outrageous in the best way, a dinner invitation that slowly becomes a pressure cooker of jealousy, resentment, desire and brutal honesty as the night drags on and the drinks keep flowing.

It’s an extremely personal film for Wilde and that sincerity really does come through. The material very obviously taps into the emotional wreckage of a long relationship unraveling, and it’s hard not to see the echoes of her own very public breakup with Jason Sudeikis all over it. The way the film dissects resentment between partners, the exhaustion of trying to perform happiness in front of other couples, the quiet humiliation of watching someone else’s freedom up close. Those moments feel raw in a way that clearly comes from lived experience. You can tell this is a story Wilde needed to tell and that emotional honesty is what ultimately carries the movie.

At the same time the film sometimes gets in its own way. It’s both overwritten and over directed to the point where the movie occasionally forgets to also be bold and funny with the wild concept sitting right in front of it. Wilde makes herself the emotional centerpiece and she’s good, but it comes at the expense of the neighbors. Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz should be the chaotic engine of this story and instead they feel oddly restrained when they should have been allowed to go fully unhinged. The result is a movie that keeps threatening to explode but rarely quite does.

And yet the ending hit me like a truck. I fully sobbed. The emotional honesty Wilde builds toward lands in a way that completely disarmed me. The score helps a lot there too, a gorgeous piece of music that carries the final stretch into something genuinely moving.

It doesn’t completely work but it works more than it doesn’t. [B-]