When a film has been remade six times over the past six years, in six different countries, it must be tapping into something significant. But what? In 2020, Catalan filmmaker Cesc Gay, released The People Upstairs, an adaptation of his own hit play. In the years that have followed, we’ve seen versions from Italy, Switzerland, Russia, France and South Korea. Now the United States has gotten into the act, with The Invite, directed by Olivia Wilde.
I haven’t seen the full World Cup procession of remakes, each of them tweaked for a local audience, but it’s clear the adaptability of the story owes much to its economy of means. It’s essentially a piece for the theatre, requiring nothing more complex than four actors in a room. In this version, a brief preamble in which we watch a disconsolate Seth Rogen leaving work and cycling home on a tiny bike, is only by way of setting the scene. All the drama and comedy springs from the verbal interaction of the four main characters.
There is an entire sub-genre of films about dinner parties, from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) To Babette’s Feast (1987), to The Menu (2022), and dozens of others in which the drama and comedy are crucially dependent on a single set piece. The Invite is an unusually lean example of the type, as dinner is never actually served.
No-one who feels a night at the cinema is complete without a car chase or a martial arts contest need feel concerned about the limited scope of this story, which is engrossing from start to finish as layers of social masquerade and self-defence are peeled away. When the lights go down, we have a taste of what will follow with a witticism by Oscar Wilde (no relation to Olivia): “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”