Review: 'The Invite' is a sharp and honest comedy centering on two couples on an intensely awkward first dinner party

In the sharply funny and brutally honest comedy “The Invite,” director Olivia Wilde starts with one question — how well do you know your neighbors? — and arrestingly falls into another question: How well do you know your spouse?

The movie starts with Wilde’s character, Angela, playing Mrs. Dalloway and buying what she needs for what she hopes is a successful dinner party. Her husband, Joe (Seth Rogen), a professional musician now working unhappily as a music teacher, is on his way home, forgetting that Angela has invited the new couple in their apartment complex.

Joe gets home and immediately he and Angela get into an argument about the new neighbors, with Joe questioning why they were invited in the first place. Angela feels a late urge to change her blouse, while begging Joe not to bring up the noise they’ve been hearing from upstairs. Joe, Angela notes, has already started in on the wine.

Then the neighbor arrive: Piña (Penelope Cruz), a sexologist, and Hawk (Edward Norton), a recently retired firefighter. Things get real weird, real fast, with Joe and Angela being both put off by and strangely attracted to this couple, who seem more in touch with their emotions and their sexuality — which leads the conversation in some strange areas.

Wilde (who directed “Booksmart” and “Don’t Worry, Darling”) has some great material to work with: It’s a remake of a Spanish comedy-drama, “Sentimental,” with an American rewrite by Will McCormick and Rashida Jones (who collaborated on the 2012 romantic comedy “Celeste and Jesse Forever”). The script moves fast, and Wilde encourages her co-stars to go fast with it — and the result is a four-person comedy of manners, like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” played for uncomfortable laughs.

Wilde has her cast humming along so perfectly that it’s hard to say which actor is giving the best performance. Some moments it’s Rogen, letting Joe’s passive-aggressive loathing become not so passive. Other times it’s Wilde, whose Angela is flustered by the attention paid by these strangers. Norton gets a few shots in, playing Hawk as a smarmy hypersensitive male. And Cruz beguiles as Piña, who’s both instigator and observer in the mind games that proceed into the night.

“The Invite” is a smart ensemble piece where the tension and humor intertwine into something that’s as funny as it is unsettling. It’s a party you don’t want to miss.

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‘The Invite’

★★★★

Opens Friday, July 10, in theaters. Rated R for sexual material, language throughout, and drug use. Running time: 107 minutes.