Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton in The Invite. Photograph: Black Bear/PA View image in fullscreen Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton in The Invite. Photograph: Black Bear/PA Film The Invite welcomes heterosexual polyamory into cinemas. It’s about time Savina Petkova As a non-monogamist, it’s refreshing to see a film that reflects modern attitudes to non-conventional relationships, instead of using them as a punchline or cautionary tale
W hat is the chief obstacle that must be overcome in most modern-day big-screen romcoms? Lack of attraction? Misaligning schedules? Or, perhaps, heteromonogamy? If that wasn’t the dominating norm of human relationships, many movie plots would be much swifter to resolve. What if Elizabeth Olsen didn’t have to choose between Callum Turner and Miles Teller in Eternity ? Or Twilight allowed Bella to be in a throuple with Edward and Jacob? Even though both films have fantasy narratives, their predestined outcome is as real as it gets – a man and a woman (re)marry and live happily ever after.
Read more For a long time, alternative relationship structures were relegated to fan fiction, undeserving of mainstream fictional representations where conflict and resolution are both inscribed in coupledom. Even the films that challenged mononormativity, such as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, sustain the cautionary tale: opening up your relationship will eventually break it. As a practising non-monogamist, I yearn to see my values represented on screen as something more than a cautionary tale. Recently, the love triangles of Past Lives (implied) and Challengers (consummated) have suggested that perhaps Hollywood itself may be opening up. Then came The Invite, a poly-romcom just in time for the Week of Visibility for Non-monogamy .
In The Invite, Angela and Joe (Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen) have raised a child and, in the course of their marriage, lost their spark. Their guests for the evening – a suave Edward Norton and a dazzling Penélope Cruz, playing upstairs neighbours Hawk and Piña – seem the exact opposite, having an excess of NRE (new relationship energy) and loud, bed-shaking sex. “We are non-monogamous,” they say, and the offer for shared play seems like a perfect deus ex machina for every dry spell. The die is cast and the flame can be rekindled, but for a viewer identifying as polyamorous, it doesn’t come naturally to root for Angela and Joe.
Regardless of which couple you relate to, The Invite is a rip-roaring viewing experience. The film toys with thriller genre conventions, amping up the pressure as the dinner party goes from bad to worse, to then recast it as sexual tension in the same domestic setting. Meeting a new partner is uncharted territory. It’s scary, like inviting a pair of very attractive strangers into your pristine home.
As an umbrella term, non-monogamy describes an array of relationships (including polyamory) involving multiple intimate, romantic or sexual partners, with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. In the US and Canada, one in five people have experience with non-monogamy, while the numbers surveyed in the UK show a third of heterosexual men and 11% of women as open to having more than one long-term partner. According to Ruby Rare, intimacy expert at the dating app Feeld and author of The Non-Monogamy Playbook, on-screen depictions of non-monogamy are many people’s only frame of reference. “Only 27% of people outside…