FILM OF THE WEEK: The Invite - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

My partner and I went out for dinner recently with a married couple who had just spent a week driving around Ireland with another pair of friends. Before we'd even ordered drinks, they issued one heartfelt plea: "Please don't be fighting. Or if you are, just pretend you aren't."

Their idyllic road trip, it turned out, had been spent trapped in a car while another couple conducted a rolling post-mortem of their relationship, each disagreement picked over in forensic detail before spilling into restaurants, cafés and hotel breakfasts. "There was no escape," one of them groaned.

An absolute nightmare in real life, of course. Onscreen, however, couples unravelling remains one of our favourite spectator sports. From Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Scenes from a Marriage, from prestige television of Couples Therapy the endless conveyor belt of reality dating shows like Love Island, we never seem to tire of watching people discover that the relationship they've been performing bears only a passing resemblance to the one they're actually living.

Olivia Wilde's sharply funny film The Invite understands exactly why.

Set almost entirely inside a beautifully curated San Francisco apartment, the film follows Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde), a long-married couple whose upstairs neighbours, Pína (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), come over for dinner after months of keeping Joe and Angela awake with their exceptionally enthusiastic sex lives. It is an irresistibly simple premise that gradually expands into something far richer than a comedy of awkward manners.

Initially, everything unfolds according to the familiar rhythms of a great dinner-party drama. There are passive-aggressive barbs disguised as jokes, decades-old resentments lurking beneath throwaway comments, conversations that pivot from the mundane to the painfully intimate in the space of a sentence. The script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack is razor-sharp and laugh-out-loud funny. Wilde understands the pleasures of watching social niceties slowly disintegrate, pacing every revelation with remarkable confidence.

But what makes The Invite more than another chamber piece about unhappy middle-class couples is that it becomes less interested in sex than performance.

Joe and Angela have become trapped inside the routines of their marriage, repeating the same arguments with theatrical precision, because the script is more familiar than genuine connection. Angela performs the role of the cheerful, accommodating hostess even as anxiety flickers across her face. Joe refuses to perform at all, allowing every irritation and insecurity to spill out into the room. Even their apartment is a performance of class and tase that Angela wants others to see, while Joe feels it is a n emasculating farce.

Their guests are performers too. Pína, an exuberant sex therapist with unmistakable Esther Perel energy, has built an identity around radical openness and liberated pleasure, while Hawk projects the serene confidence of a man who has read every self-help book ever written and emerged convinced he has transcended ordinary human insecurity. Yet Wilde is too perceptive a filmmaker to let authenticity become another performance in itself. Hawk's carefully cultivated enlightenment begins to look just as constructed as everyone else's, while Pína's wisdom and understanding personal dynamics becomes questionable when its revealed that hawk was a patient when they started seeing each other (This pop culture trope of therapists dating patients does need to die a death, but that’s for another day.)

The question gradually shifts. Once the dinner-party etiquette collapses, once nobody is performing the version of themselves they'd like the room to see, who remains? Are these people still compatible without the stories they've been telling about themselves? Can a relationship survive once its old script no longer works, or is the only option to write an entirely new one?

It is remarkably sophisticated territory for what is also an enormously entertaining comedy.

Seth Rogen gives a fantastic performance. Joe could easily become exhausting; he is prickly, cynical and perpetually dissatisfied. Yet Rogen grounds every complaint in recognisable disappointment. Joe isn't simply unpleasant. He is a man painfully aware that life hasn't become the version he imagined, directing that frustration everywhere except where it belongs. He feels distant from his wife and distant from everyone else who wants him to perform. Even when he's behaving terribly, you understand exactly why.

Wilde is even more impressive as Angela, capturing the exhausting self-consciousness of someone who spends every social interaction trying to keep everyone comfortable while quietly disappearing herself. Jangly, nervy and constantly on the brink, her performance becomes increasingly affecting as flickers of desire, resentment and curiosity begin breaking through the lid she’s so desperately trying to keep over her feelings.

Edward Norton has always possessed impeccable comic timing, and Hawk allows him to deploy it with delicious precision. He gives the character just enough smug certainty to become gently ridiculous without ever turning him into a caricature. Penélope Cruz, meanwhile, radiates sensuality, making Pína simultaneously seductive, funny and razor-sharp.

Wilde's direction is every bit as assured as the performances. She has a terrific understanding of rhythm, allowing conversations to breathe before tightening the screws almost imperceptibly. The apartment itself becomes another character: elegant, carefully designed, beautiful enough to admire but just self-conscious enough to reflect Angela's desire for a life that appears perfectly assembled from the outside.

The use of space is especially impressive. Doorways, corridors and dining tables constantly rearrange shifting alliances, while Adam Newport-Berra's camera finds intimacy in close-ups of Wilde's frayed expressions and Rogen's mounting exasperation. Devonté Hynes' wonderfully off-kilter jazz score keeps everything deliberately unbalanced, echoing Angela's jangling nervous system as conversations drift unpredictably between flirtation, confession and confrontation.

Like the best relationship dramas, The Invite isn't really asking whether these couples should stay together. It's asking what happens when the performances we construct for ourselves finally stop working, and whether there's enough truth underneath them to build something new.

The answer is often very funny, sometimes surprisingly moving, and so far, one of the year's most enjoyable evenings at the cinema.

Directed by Olivia Wilde. Written by Will McCormack, Rashida Jones. Cinematography by Adam Newport-Berra. Edited by Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music by Devonté Hynes.
Starring Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton. 107 mins

• Watch the trailer below: