REVIEW: The Invite: sex has never been funnier… or more deliciously awkward!

Superbly skilful acting by a starry cast at the absolute top of their game makes The Invite without a shadow of doubt the best film of the year so far – deliciously awkward, hilariously funny and yet somehow remarkably poignant.

It’s a toe-curler of a gem – the tale of the ever-unpredictable meeting of a couple – a failed musician and his frustrated wife – with their neighbours, an ex-firefighter and his sexologist partner, respectively Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz.

Clearly depressed and suffering from a bad back which has become his opt out of everything, Joe (Rogen) is appalled when his wife Angela (Wilde), with whom he shares a flat and nothing much else, invites the neighbours round to dinner – not least because their exceptionally-noisy sex every night is part of everything that is weighing him down.

But his interest is piqued when Piña (Cruz) and Hawk (Norton) reveal that the noise isn’t just them. They enjoy, to put it mildly, sex parties… and were wondering if Joe and Angela would like to join them.

The dialogue moves as swiftly as it moves beautifully, shading through every kind of awkwardness into excited curiosity. You’d love to see the outtakes for this movie. How on earth did they manage the film without repeatedly cracking up. And yet, in the finished version at least, they retain their seriousness for conversations which are anything but. Sex – or at least, talk of it – has never been funnier. The skill is all in the delivery, but what makes the piece so gripping is that you never quite know where it is going.

The couple that lets it all hang out meets the couple that keeps it all in – and you wonder whether it’s going to be absolutely shattering or profoundly healing as they partner up and head off into separate rooms. Say no more, say no more, as Monty Python so famously said.

The ever-changing dynamics, the tensions, the simmering resentments, the hopes, the wild expectations, all are expertly delivered in a film which just gets better and better, heaping up the pressure. Is it going to get an ending which matches the quality of the rest of it? You bet it does.

Beautifully judged throughout, this is a masterly dissection of repression and disinhibition, of estrangement, of curiosity and of a love which has lost its way… but which might yet be reignited.