Olivia Wilde is back

Olivia Wilde’s directing career, so far, is averaging .500. Booksmart: good. Don’t Worry Darling: bad. I don’t even mean all the behind-the-scenes drama on that one, I just mean Don’t Worry Darling does not function as a narrative. It’s like there are entire scenes missing from the script. But now, after a divisive film and even more divisive production and promotion period, Olivia Wilde is back as a director and I’m genuinely glad. Men f-ck up movies all the time and it never slows them down. True parity is letting women fail—fail hard, fail spectacularly—and move on like that sh-t never happened.

Wilde’s new film is The Invite, an English-language adaptation of The People Upstairs, a Spanish film written and directed by Cesc Gay. The Invite is adapted by Rashida Jones & Will McCormack, and Wilde directs and stars in the film. Co-starring with her are Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, and Edward Norton. The Invite is billed as a comedy-drama, and it’s about two couples who are neighbors and have a fateful dinner party. The trailer dropped yesterday, and yes, I am feeling this.

Without doing any googling, you assume this is sex stuff, right? But I like how this trailer is cut, with the windowing effect shrinking the world into claustrophobic frames, and the increasing panic coming off Seth Rogen’s character. The Norton/Cruz couple could also be into hunting humans! It’s probably sex stuff, but maybe it’s actually hunting humans stuff! Again, probably not, but there is an edge in the trailer that suggests someone will die before the night is out, and Everyone Is A Suspect.

Showing that Wilde is truly rebounding unscathed from Don’t Worry Darling, The Invite was received very well at Sundance earlier this year. It also prompted a good old-fashioned bidding war, selling in the eight-figure range at a time when the Sundance market was very slow, even depressed. That is a bright spot for the indie sector, though The Invite is also a film with an extremely marketable, powerhouse cast—a film starring four unknown actors would not get the same response from distributors. It’s a very specific bright spot.

Speaking of marketing, A24 won that bidding war, so brace yourselves for an aggressive press campaign later this summer. The Invite is set for release at the end of June. Once upon a time, that was a great spot for adult-oriented counterprogramming; now, though, genuinely who knows. Maybe The Invite will be a sleeper hit and make $80 million. Maybe six people will see it. It is impossible to tell right now. The Drama’s opening weekend ($14 million) is a sign that people will turn up for a twisted romantic drama, as is last year’s summer box office for Materialists, which topped $100 million. A24 is undoubtedly hoping for a Materialists-style hit here, which is not a big reach, given that both films are rom-dram ensembles pieces about the nightmare of modern love.

I’m just glad to see Olivia Wilde back on track. Whatever punishment you feel she may deserve for dating an actor in her film and getting messy was dealt tenfold by Harry Styles’s unhinged stans, never mind Jason Sudeikis, her ex-husband, ruining Ted Lasso to make an entire season of television about their divorce. Whatever wrongs you feel she committed—mine is just that she was unprofessional—she paid for it in the court of public opinion, several times over. And now it’s years later and her new film looks great. Sincerely, good for her.