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. Rashida Jones and Will McCormack adapted the screenplay from Cesc Gay’s Spanish film Sentimental, itself based on his play Los vecinos de arriba. Wilde and the cast then spent two weeks workshopping the script with Jones and McCormack before filming. The result feels unusually alive for a movie built largely around four people talking in an apartment: funny, uncomfortable, sexually explicit, and attentive to the tiny injuries long-term partners know how to inflict on each other.
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 shaped by her influence. Wilde has described Perel’s ideas as central to changes made during development.
Then the screenplay tells us Hawk was Piña’s patient.
After treating sex and relationships with more intelligence than Hollywood usually bothers to offer, The Invite reaches for one of psychotherapy’s oldest and most damaging romantic fantasies.
It is a strange choice for a movie this smart.
Desire 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, with agreements, complexity, and emotional consequences. 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 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.
A partner you met at 27 does not remain 27 because you married them.
Bodies change. Desire changes. Fantasies change. Boundaries change. Health changes. The meaning someone attaches to sex can change.
Joe and Angela have become experts on each other’s disappointments. They have stopped investigating each other.
Wilde has spoken about long-term relationships in similar terms, emphasizing the need to remain curious about who a partner becomes. She has also described the central question of The Invite as whether Joe and Angela can create a new relationship with each other once the old one can no longer continue as it has.
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 enters the conversation as something that affects sexuality, bodies, relationships, and how people experience themselves.
The film lets adults discuss bodies, pleasure, aging, jealousy, and desire using actual words.
That specificity gives Piña credibility as a sexologist and psychotherapist.
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. She has an erotic life, professional intelligence, humor, insecurity, jealousy, and authority.
Perel’s influence on the character and film 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.
The film can imagine pegging, consensual nonmonogamy, perimenopause, group sex, middle-aged desire, bisexuality, male vulnerability, and adults speaking plainly about sexuality.
A sex therapist meeting her partner literally anywhere other than her patient list proved too ambitious.
The trope deserves far more scrutiny than the film gives it.
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 is responsible for maintaining the boundary.
American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists' (AASECT's) standard for sex therapists is especially clear. Its Code of Conduct prohibits sexual behavior with potential, current, or former consumers. Its ethical standards treat the counseling or therapeutic relationship as continuing in perpetuity for purposes of sexual misconduct.
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 turns that structural inequality 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 inconvenience standing between two people who belong together.
It also flatters the therapist considerably more than it considers the patient.
And The Invite barely pauses over any of this.
Hawk’s history with Piña should alter 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 therapist-patient boundary violations can contaminate the experience of care itself. A patient may be left questioning their 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 deliberately 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 the finished film 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 bring Esther Perel into the room should have recognized that a therapist’s access to a patient is terrible raw material for a sexy origin story.
The creative team 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 What the Film Understands Best
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 that idea.
Joe sits at the piano. Angela joins him. They play together. She rests her head on his shoulder.
The scene does not tell us what their marriage will look like tomorrow. Wilde has said she wanted audiences to debate whether they stay together. She and Seth Rogen even interpreted the ending differently while filming it.
I read the action itself 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. Any possibility between them has to begin with the people sitting there at the end.
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.
The irony is that a film so interested in inherited scripts misses one of its own.
Marriage and sex come with cultural scripts that people can question, reject, or renegotiate together. Those choices belong to the people in the relationship.
A therapist’s ethical boundary is fundamentally different. The relationship is structurally unequal. The therapist holds professional authority, privileged access to vulnerability, and responsibility for protecting the person who came there for care. That boundary is not another convention two people can mutually decide has outlived its usefulness.
Hollywood has created its own script around that boundary: the exceptional patient who reaches the therapist in a way no one else can, until professional access starts looking like intimacy and a power imbalance gets rewritten as chemistry.
That is the stale script The Invite should be questioning.
The film is perceptive enough to challenge inherited ideas about desire, marriage, and sexuality.
It should have been perceptive enough to recognize the fantasy it was reproducing.
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.