Olivia Wilde offers an interview at 2026 SFFILM Festival Opening Night at Swedish American Hall on April 24, 2026 in San Francisco, California.
In Olivia Wilde’s new film “The Invite,” a San Francisco condo turns into an interpersonal battleground. The claustrophobic, not-so-romantic comedy directed by Wilde is set in the City by the Bay, and had two days of native filming, hitting spots like Molinari Delicatessen, A.P. Giannini Middle School in the Outer Sunset and the Glen Park BART station. Last night time, the film screened in 35mm on the Castro Theatre because the opening film of the San Francisco International Film Festival, with Wilde in attendance.
“I think we really took advantage of everything that I love so much about this city. Which is the texture, the vibe, the specificity of this place. It’s such an incredible cultural melting pot, and you can feel that. It sets the tone for our film,” Wilde stated to KTVU on the pink carpet at Swedish American Hall earlier than the screening.
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“The Invite” premiered at Sundance to common acclaim, sparking a bidding warfare that resulted in film distributor A24 buying the film for over $10 million. It is set for a theatrical launch on June 26.
The San Francisco pictures are relegated to B-roll through the film’s introduction, however set the stage for a darkish drama with a plot twist that feels distinctly Bay Area. Wilde performs Angela, a mom and homemaker who obsesses over renovating her traditional San Francisco condo whereas preserving it true to its classic character. Seth Rogen performs her husband Joe, a disgruntled music trainer at an East Bay conservatory who cycles up San Francisco hills on a motorcycle that is means too small for him. Their marriage could be very a lot on the rocks, with the couple squabbling over the pettiest of home particulars.
“Seth and I had worked together before. We knew we had this weird ability to harmonize with each other,” Wilde stated throughout a Q&A following the screening. “We like to say that we can talk over each other while listening to each other, and we really enjoy arguing. It was so fun. We loved to argue and scream in each other’s faces.”
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Joe and Angela invite their upstairs neighbors Hawk and Pina (Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz) over for a cocktail party, throughout which Angela hopes to impress them with a ramification from Molinari, in the meantime Joe plans to confront them about their extraordinarily loud and “animalistic” intercourse.
“I don’t want to spoil the film. What I will say is that it doesn’t do what you think it is going to do,” SFFILM govt director Anne Lai informed SFGATE. “To see these actors playing off of each other, I’ve never seen them do roles like this before. It just continually subverts your expectations in a wonderful way.”
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Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton seem in “The Invite” by Olivia Wilde, an official number of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
Eventually, Hawk and Pina make an invite of their very own, which turns the plot on its head. It’s a wickedly humorous film that lays naked the messy mechanisms of marriage with a whip-smart script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, plus a tense cello rating from Devonté Hynes of Blood Orange. Wilde cited director Mike Nichols as a major inspiration, calling out movies like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “The Graduate” and “The Birdcage.” At the Castro screening, “The Invite” acquired the most important laughs I’ve heard in a theater in latest reminiscence.
Although viewers do not see a lot of San Francisco, Wilde informed SFGATE that there is nowhere else it might’ve been set.
“I feel that it’s so telling when a film sets a very specific location you can tell what that’s supposed to mean, and what it means about these characters,” she stated. “When you see the film, it really does make sense that this particular group is from here. I think that there’s nowhere else we could’ve filmed it, and nowhere else we could’ve set the story.”
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She continued to elaborate on the film’s San Francisco connections through the Q&A, gushing over the native film crews, calling the town “the most beautiful place on the planet” and reiterating how rooted the characters are in the id of the town.
“The type of people in this story, I just somehow understood that they would probably live here. Pina and Hawk could live above any of you, right?” she stated.
The San Francisco International Film Festival continues via May 4 with 79 programs from 40 completely different international locations.
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