The Polyamory Movie Hollywood Wasn't Ready For (Or Was It?)

When Penélope Cruz’s character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona first propositioned two women for a weekend of casual sex back in 2008, it felt transgressive enough to take to a movie theater with your grandparents. Fast forward to 2026, and Olivia Wilde’s new chamber comedy The Invite wants to tackle the same cultural shift—except now, polyamory and ethical nonmonogamy have become so normalized in the cultural conversation that the film’s central conflict feels almost quaint.

The setup is straightforward: millennial couple Angela and Joe (Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen) live downstairs from their neighbors Hawk and Pina (Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz), whose active sex life is…audible. When the upstairs duo extends an invitation to swap partners, it becomes a claustrophobic four-person drama about what happens when an unhappy marriage confronts the possibility of looking elsewhere. The movie’s chamber-piece structure keeps the tension intimate, and there are genuine laughs buried in the bickering. But here’s where it stumbles: the film never actually commits to showing anyone act on their impulses. It stops short of actual nonmonogamous encounters, treating mere contemplation as sufficient material for a full feature.

That restraint might have felt bold a few years ago. Today, after waves of think pieces about throuples, the polyamory-adjacent chaos of Love Island, and real-world couples openly navigating open relationships, asking what if a couple hooked up with another couple reads less like social commentary and more like a cautious toe-dip into familiar waters. The Invite understands this tension—a practising non-monogamist even praised the film for explaining nonmonogamy’s vocabulary without being didactic about it. But that educational impulse might be exactly the problem. The movie plays it so safe that it becomes more Polyamory 101 than genuine exploration.

There’s an irony baked into the film’s timing. Society finally feels ready for a mainstream movie about nonmonogamy—and inevitably, by the time that happens, some viewers have already moved on to find the concept routine. The Invite captures that moment of cultural whiplash perfectly. It’s not that the movie fails at depicting polyamory; it’s that it seems more interested in framing the concept as revolutionary than in actually diving into the messy, funny, complicated reality of it. For a film about people breaking relationship rules, playing it this safe feels like a missed opportunity.