The Invite Understands Desire. Then It Gives Its Sex Therapist the Oldest Bad Trope in the Book
This article contains spoilers.
Olivia Wilde’s The Invite opens with a dinner party and ends with a marriage dragged into full view.
Joe and Angela have spent years accumulating resentment, disappointment, sexual distance, and grievances they know well enough to weaponize but have never really resolved. Their upstairs neighbors, Piña and Hawk, arrive speaking about sex with startling ease. Before dinner is over, they have proposed group sex and exposed far more consequential things than anybody’s sexual preferences.
The group-sex invitation gives the movie its premise. Desire gives it its substance.
For most of its running time, The Invite is unusually intelligent about long-term relationships, sex, aging, jealousy, sexual communication, and the stories people tell themselves about what a successful relationship should look like. Wilde brought psychotherapist Esther Perel onto the film as a consultant, and Penélope Cruz’s Piña was explicitly shaped by her influence. Perel has described seeing ideas from Mating in Captivity come alive through the film, while Wilde has spoken publicly about how deeply Perel’s thinking informed the project.
Then the screenplay tells us Hawk was Piña’s patient.
After spending much of the film treating sex and relationships with more intelligence than Hollywood usually bothers to offer, The Invite reaches for one of psychotherapy’s most tired and damaging fantasies.
It is a strange choice for a movie this smart.
Desire Usually Has a History
Joe and Angela are not sexually disconnected because the universe misplaced their chemistry.
Their sexual relationship has been living inside the rest of their marriage.
The sexlessness makes sense. They keep score. They carry old disappointments into new conversations. Joe’s dissatisfaction with his life seeps into the way he relates to Angela. Angela’s resentment has hardened around years of feeling unseen and constrained. Both know where the other is tender. Both have learned how to press there.
This is familiar in couples and sex therapy. Desire can change alongside resentment, chronic conflict, shame, stress, body image, disappointment, pain, aging, medication, illness, sexual routines, and years of interactions that make vulnerability less appealing.
Sometimes people come into therapy wanting to fix the sex while everything surrounding it remains untouched.
Bodies tend to be less willing to compartmentalize.
Sex asks for some combination of attention, curiosity, permission, pleasure, vulnerability, play, and enough psychological space to notice what you want. Criticism, defensiveness, resentment, and emotional retreat can leave very little room for any of it.
Joe and Angela have plenty of history together. They have very little room left to be surprised by each other.
The dinner changes that.
Sexual Comparison Can Expose What a Couple Stopped Asking
Piña and Hawk immediately destabilize Joe and Angela because they seem to inhabit an entirely different sexual universe.
They talk openly. They acknowledge attraction to other people. They practice consensual nonmonogamy. They seem comfortable with desires Joe and Angela can barely discuss without becoming defensive.
The obvious temptation is to compare the couples and decide who has figured relationships out.
The film mostly resists it.
Joe and Angela are monogamous and deeply unhappy. Piña and Hawk are consensually nonmonogamous and still experience jealousy, insecurity, grief, irritation, and conflict. Their relationship structure has not granted them immunity from being human.
Consensual nonmonogamy appears as an actual relationship structure rather than a shortcut for promiscuity, dysfunction, or disaster. Monogamy remains something people can actively choose.
Both require people to negotiate desire, boundaries, attachment, change, and the unnerving fact that a partner has an interior life you will never completely control.
Seeing another relationship can also expose questions a couple stopped asking about their own.
Are we sexually satisfied?
What have we decided is off-limits without ever discussing it?
Which parts of our relationship are choices we are still making?
What do I want at this age, in this body, in this version of my life?
What have I avoided telling you because I already decided how you would respond?
Piña and Hawk do not give Joe and Angela answers.
They make avoidance harder.
The Sexual Scripts We Inherit Follow Us to Bed
Some of The Invite’s strongest observations concern the rules people carry into relationships without realizing they are rules.
There are expectations about how much sex a married couple should have, who initiates, what counts as sex, what desire should look like with age, and what a “good” spouse tolerates without complaint.
Those scripts can become remarkably durable.
People continue performing versions of sexuality that once worked, never worked especially well, or belonged to much earlier versions of themselves because changing the script requires a conversation they do not know how to begin.
You can know someone intimately and still be working from outdated information about them.
Bodies change. Desire changes. Fantasies change. Boundaries change. Health changes. The meaning someone attaches to sex can change.
A partner you met at 27 does not remain 27 because you married them.
Wilde has spoken about long relationships in similar terms, emphasizing the importance of continuing to discover who a partner becomes rather than assuming the person you already know is fixed.
Joe and Angela have become experts on each other’s disappointments.
They have stopped investigating each other.
The Film Says the Quiet Parts Out Loud
Hollywood has spent decades making movies about sex while remaining remarkably squeamish about discussing sexuality with any specificity.
The Invite is refreshingly less coy.
Condoms become an actual object passed between people. Pegging gets discussed without requiring the movie to panic about a man’s masculinity. Kink and consensual nonmonogamy exist in adult conversation. The orgasm gap gets named. Menopause is discussed with depth as a systemic issue instead of just a punchline about hot flashes
The film lets adults discuss bodies, pleasure, aging, jealousy, and desire using actual words.
That specificity gives Piña authority.
She listens before jumping in. She sees patterns quickly. She recognizes what Joe and Angela keep circling. Cruz gives her the contained attention of someone who spends her professional life watching what people say, what they avoid, and the distance between the two.
Piña is also allowed to be sexual herself.
Sex therapists and sex educators are frequently flattened on screen into clinically sterile experts who apparently left their own bodies at home or hypersexual provocateurs whose expertise mainly makes them exotic.
Piña gets more range than that. She has an erotic life, professional intelligence, humor, insecurity, jealousy, and authority.
Perel’s influence on the character is explicit. She consulted on the film, and Wilde has described the project as deeply informed by her ideas about eroticism, desire, and long-term partnership.
Which makes the next choice particularly hard to understand.
Then the Movie Gives the Therapist Her Patient
Late in the film, Piña tells Joe that Hawk was a patient.
The screenplay drops the information into an emotional monologue and keeps moving.
There it is.
The brilliant, sexually sophisticated therapist has built her central romantic relationship with someone who entered her life through therapy.
Hollywood can imagine pegging, consensual nonmonogamy, perimenopause, group sex, female desire, male vulnerability, and adults speaking plainly about sexuality.
A sex therapist meeting her partner literally anywhere other than her patient list proved too ambitious.
A therapy relationship gives a clinician extraordinary access to another person. Clients disclose shame, trauma, desire, attachment wounds, fantasies, fears, family history, and information they may have shared nowhere else. They are invited to trust the therapist because the therapist is professionally responsible for protecting what happens inside that relationship.
Attraction does not remove that responsibility.
Sexual and romantic feelings can emerge in therapy. Transference, idealization, dependency, attachment, projection, and the intensity of being deeply understood are familiar parts of clinical work.
The therapist is trained to recognize those dynamics and responsible for maintaining the boundary.
AASECT’s standard for sex therapists is especially clear. Its ethical guidance prohibits sexual behavior with a consumer receiving counseling or therapy and states that, for determining sexual misconduct, the counseling or therapeutic relationship is deemed to continue in perpetuity.
Therapy cannot ethically become a route to a future romantic relationship.
A clinician acquires knowledge, authority, access, and intimacy through a relationship the patient entered for care. The patient cannot retroactively enter that original relationship on equal footing.
The trope distorts that power difference into romance.
The therapist meets the exceptional patient who understands her. The patient gets through the professional exterior. Their connection is presented as singular enough to make the boundary seem incidental to the love story.
That framing turns a clinician’s responsibility to protect the therapeutic relationship into an obstacle between two people who were apparently meant to find each other.
It also flatters the therapist considerably more than it considers the patient.
The Invite barely pauses over any of this.
Hawk’s history with Piña should change how we understand their relationship. Instead, the revelation becomes another provocative detail about an unconventional couple. Piña retains her clinical authority and continues to function as the person in the room who sees everyone else most clearly.
The film grants her a remarkable amount of ethical amnesia.
Real boundary violations can contaminate the experience of care itself. A patient may be left questioning their own judgment, what happened during treatment, and whether another therapist can ever safely be trusted with the same vulnerability.
That reality is less cinematic than forbidden chemistry.
Hollywood keeps choosing the chemistry.
Esther Perel’s Involvement Makes the Choice Stranger
The ethical problem exists regardless of who consulted on the film.
Perel’s involvement makes the creative decision harder to understand.
Wilde brought one of the most recognizable psychotherapists working in relationships and sexuality into a movie about desire, marriage, eroticism, and sexual communication. Perel has publicly discussed consulting on the project and seeing ideas from Mating in Captivity reflected in it.
The production cared about getting the psychology right.
It often did.
Then it used a therapist-patient relationship to explain its therapist’s love life.
There is no public basis for knowing whether Perel objected to that plot point, supported it, discussed it, or had influence over it. The choice belongs to the film.
A production sophisticated enough to hire Esther Perel should have recognized that a therapist’s access to a patient is terrible raw material for a sexy origin story.
The writers had the entire adult world available to them.
A conference. A bar. A book launch. A delayed flight. A dating app. A friend’s dinner. The produce aisle.
They chose the patient list.
The Ending Returns to the Question the Film Gets Right
The film ends where it began: at the piano.
Early in Joe and Angela’s relationship, music belongs to connection and possibility. By the time of the dinner party, the piano carries disappointment, abandoned ambition, resentment, and much of what Joe believes he failed to become.
Earlier, when Joe comes home and he and Angela start slipping into another familiar argument, they talk about resetting.
The final scene returns to a reset.
Joe sits at the piano. Angela joins him. They play together. She rests her head on his shoulder.
The image does not tell us what their marriage will look like tomorrow. Wilde has said she wanted viewers to debate whether they stay together, and she has since said she leans toward believing they do.
I read the action in the final scene more clearly.
The film begins with Joe and Angela playing together near the beginning of their relationship and returns them to the piano after a night spent saying things they had managed not to say for years.
The parallel is too deliberate to ignore.
They are attempting the reset.
They cannot return to the people at the piano in the opening scene. They know too much now. The possibility is in meeting each other from where they actually are.
That is where The Invite is most perceptive about long-term desire. Intimacy cannot depend on preserving an earlier version of a partner or a relationship. Bodies change. Wants change. People change. Staying connected requires continuing to find out who is there.
Joe and Angela finally do some of that.
The irony is that the film spends so much time asking its characters to examine the scripts they inherited and misses one of its own.
Marriage has scripts. Sex has scripts. Therapy does too.
The fantasy of the therapist whose boundaries give way for one uniquely compelling patient turns professional access into romantic intimacy and a power imbalance into chemistry.
A movie this interested in challenging stale ideas about sex should have recognized one when it wrote it.
Disclosure: I’m Kristine Seitz, a sex therapist and sex educator. I have no affiliation with The Invite, its filmmakers, A24, or Esther Perel. I’m writing about the film from my professional perspective on relationships, sexuality, and psychotherapy ethics.