The Invite, a new film from A24, had only been in theaters for a couple of days when I started receiving texts from different friends urging me to see it on the big screen. “Text me right after and tell me what you think!” one friend insisted.
Warning! Spoiler Alerts Ahead:
The Invite follows two couples living in San Francisco’s Marina neighborhood: Angela and Joe, a long-married couple with a tween daughter who relentlessly—and contemptuously—fight, and Hawk and Piña, a newly dating couple who are saccharinely in love. Unbeknownst to Joe, Angela invites Hawk and Piña over for a dinner party. The evening is awkward, uncomfortable, and increasingly unhinged. Joe is visibly and unrelentingly upset about having Hawk and Piña in their home (he’s even heard them having sex upstairs), while Angela is painfully self-conscious as she tries to appear cool and unbothered—we watch her change outfits several times.
The night takes a turn when Hawk and Piña apologize for the noise they’ve been making upstairs. They reveal that they’ve been hosting group sex parties, a revelation that fills Angela and Joe with excitement. Suddenly, they want to know everything: Who comes? What is it like? How does it work? As their curiosity unfolds, it becomes clear that Angela and Joe have virtually no sex life together and have long since lost any eroticism in the relationship.
Since this couple can’t seem to have nice things for long, we then learn that Angela is something of an exhibitionist: she’s been walking naked past her window, knowing that Hawk watches her. Joe loses his shit when he discovers this sexual betrayal, and the evening quickly deteriorates. Piña, who happens to be a psychotherapist and sexologist—and, oh, also Hawk’s former therapist, nbd–intervenes to tell the couple that their relationship is obviously over. Whether that means breaking up or reinventing their relationship into something entirely new, however, is up to them.
Relationship Part II
After a betrayal—or after enduring a long-term relationship characterized by contempt and dysfunction, as is the case with Angela and Joe, where it’s both—a couple has three options:
Stay together and maintain the status quo. Many couples choose this for all sorts of reasons: learned relationship patterns, the comfort of the familiar (even when the familiar is unpleasant), fear of being alone, financial considerations, children, or simply not knowing what an alternative could look like.
Break up. Sometimes the relationship has run its course, and separating is the healthiest option for both people.
Create a new relationship with each other. This is the path Angela and Joe seem to be moving toward by the end of the film. It doesn’t mean returning to the relationship they had before. It means intentionally reimagining what their relationship could become.
That third option is where couples therapy can be particularly useful. A therapist can help a couple step outside of their familiar patterns and begin envisioning—and building—a new relationship model. That might include examining the couple’s agreements around monogamy and renegotiating those agreements if desired. It might mean rebuilding trust after betrayal, creating new ways of communicating, or figuring out how each person wants to experience intimacy, autonomy, and eroticism within the relationship. Humans live a long time now, and it makes sense that relationships need consistent work, tending, and updating.
A Second Point: Angela Isn’t Sexually Shut Down
Angela isn’t actually sexually shut down. She can access her erotic self—she just doesn’t seem to have access to it within her relationship with Joe. Walking naked in front of the window gives her an opportunity to feel embodied, desired, and seen by Hawk, her mysterious and attractive neighbor. With him, she gets to tap into a part of herself that has been dormant for years.
After more than a decade of sex that apparently hasn’t felt worthwhile enough to show up for anymore, Angela gets to see herself as someone else through Hawk’s eyes: not the aimless wife and mom caught in a contemptuous marriage, but a woman who is desirable, interesting, and sexually alive. A betrayal or an affair is often about wanting access to a different version of oneself. The affair becomes a space where someone can experience parts of themselves that have felt unavailable, forgotten, or flattened within their primary relationship.
And if that weren’t enough, Angela cries when Hawk notices and appreciates her taste in interior design—something her own husband, Joe, no longer does. Hawk notices something important that Joe has stopped noticing; she is finally seen.
In the best-case scenario, Angela funnels this erotic energy into her relationship with Joe if they choose to remain monogamous (while he sees his own therapist to work on his depression, of course!). Then two of them can figure out how to create a relationship in which they can both again feel like fully embodied, desirable people.
One Final Point: Piña, Seriously?
I can’t finish this post without commenting on the absurdity of Piña being her partner Hawk’s former therapist. While we don’t know when Piña was his therapist—or exactly how much time has passed since their therapeutic relationship ended—it’s not a good look for us real-life therapists. I hate when therapists with poor—or totally nonexistent—boundaries are portrayed in film and media. For many people, their first exposure to therapy is through what they see on screen, and this kind of storyline can give potential clients a very distorted idea of what the therapeutic relationship is supposed to look like. Sexual or romantic relationships with former clients can result in serious ethical consequences for the therapist, including disciplinary action and potentially loss of licensure—and can create significant harm and trauma for the former client, given the enduring power imbalance inherent in the therapeutic relationship.
If you want to watch a couple fight on screen while delivering hilarious lines—courtesy of Seth Rogen’s Joe—I suggest you go see The Invite. But hey, it’s my weekend and I am off work, so maybe I should have opted for Spider Man.