There are plenty of stars wearing their work ethic on their sleeves this year — Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, and Zendaya, just to name a few, all racking up box office records and a diverse slate of roles.
But on a quieter, no less impactful scale — at least from a critic’s vantage point — is Olivia Wilde. Two films, released months apart, both orbiting the same live wire: sexual frustration and sexual liberation, approached from opposite ends of the human timeline. In one, she’s the woman starving for intimacy inside a marriage gone quiet. In the other, she’s the one doing the starving out of someone else — deliberately, hungrily, and with an agenda. Same actress, same year, two entirely different appetites. It’s some of the most interesting range-flexing any performer has pulled off in 2026, and it happened almost by accident: Wilde shot both back to back, going straight from playing a hyper-sexualized muse and dominant force in I Want Your Sex to a sexually starved wife in a crumbling marriage in The Invite — a hell of a whiplash to put yourself through as an actor, let alone while also directing one of them.
The Invite, which Wilde also directs, centers on Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen), a middle-aged married couple in San Francisco who evidently haven’t had sex in longer than either of them wants to admit out loud. Enter Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton as Pína and Hawk, the loud, magnetic upstairs couple who — once invited down for dinner — end up excavating every repressed feeling Angela and Joe have been sitting on. Shot almost entirely in one location, Wilde uses blocking, negative space, and dialogue with a precision that squeezes everything possible out of both the setting and her actors, resulting in one of the best films of the year.
I Want Your Sex, meanwhile, has Wilde playing Erika, a renowned contemporary artist who finds herself entangled with her new 23-year-old studio assistant, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman). Where Angela is repression looking for a way out, Erika is appetite that’s already found every door — and is now testing which ones Elliot is brave enough to walk through with her.
The Invite (2026)
Release Date: June 26, 2026 (US theatrical); premiered January 24, 2026 at Sundance
Runtime: 1h 47m (107 minutes)
Rated: R – for sexual material, language throughout, and drug use
Production Companies: Annapurna Pictures, FilmNation Entertainment, Permut Presentations
Producers: Ben Browning, Megan Ellison, David Permut
Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra
Editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Anthony Boys
Music/Composer: Devonté Hynes
Director: Olivia Wilde
Writer: Will McCormack & Rashida Jones (based on The People Upstairs/Sentimental by Cesc Gay)
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton
In this first film of the duo, Wilde proves she can command a screen from both sides of the camera at once. The Invite has quietly crept into the mainstream conversation on word of mouth alone, its reputation built on the strength of its blocking and its restraint — nearly the entire runtime is confined to a single apartment, which forces the film to live or die on its actors and its dialogue. There’s nothing flashy here. Just raw, authentic, deeply lived-in conversation, delivered by four of the most tenured actors working today. And every one of them earns the hype.
When we first meet Joe and Angela, they’re drawn as near-opposites. Joe is apathetic, cynical, a little selfish — the kind of guy who’d rather not examine anything too closely. Angela is high-strung, anxious, visibly insecure beneath the hostess-mode composure. The film teases the origins of their relationship early on, withholding context and nuance until much later, letting the bickering between them do the talking in the meantime. That bickering is constant, a low hum underneath every scene, and it’s clearly a marriage on the rocks — complicated further by the fact that they share a daughter, Maggie, whose presence looms over every decision either of them makes.
Then come Piña (Cruz) and Hawk (Norton): enigmatic, spontaneous, unmistakably extroverted. Piña is confident and self-possessed, disarmingly open in a way that makes everyone around her a little more honest. Hawk is calmer, more grounded, but clearly attentive — always reading the room even when he seems distracted. Joe makes it obvious from the jump that he doesn’t want this couple in his apartment for the dinner Angela arranged, and the film wastes no time letting that tension simmer. As the night unfolds, what Piña and Hawk actually came there to do — and what their presence ultimately unlocks in their hosts — comes into focus with real precision.
Given everything already on the table, it’s no surprise that sexual frustration and sexual liberation become the film’s central currency. Joe and Angela’s emotional distance clearly extends into the bedroom, and it’s Piña — a professional sexologist and therapist, of all things — who ends up offering the most insight into what sex can mean, both as a couple and in a larger group dynamic.
The Invite ultimately runs parallel to the film we’ll get into next in the way it explores the role sex plays in a relationship’s survival — here, specifically, through the lens of a middle-aged marriage.
The film’s biggest turn, one it spends its whole runtime quietly building toward, comes when it’s revealed that a hallway window connects Angela and Joe’s apartment to their upstairs neighbors’ sightline — and that Angela has been walking past it naked. First by accident. Then, deliberately, almost ritualistically. When she’s confronted with it, the truth of just how fractured her marriage has become — sexually and otherwise — comes rushing to the surface.
It’s here, near the film’s end, that we finally understand why Piña and Hawk were ever written into this story, however unwelcome Joe initially found them. As the night reaches its most exposed, most honest point, the foursome edges toward group sex — until Piña, working purely off intuition, calls it off, deciding it might be healthier for each couple to pair off separately instead. She reads the anger simmering beneath the surface and knows a group dynamic isn’t the right vessel for it.
Of course, nothing sexual ends up happening between either pair — Joe’s aching back, referenced early in the film as a passing joke, becomes the very thing that derails both couples’ spontaneous plans, plans that, by their own admission, they desperately needed to follow through on.
What follows is some of the most open, unguarded conversation in the film. Piña cracks the marriage wide open, surfacing the real complications underneath Joe and Angela’s dynamic, while also revealing pieces of Hawk’s own history — including the origin of his self-appointed nickname. After a moment that’s both tender and genuinely funny, the film arrives at what feels like the end of Joe and Angela’s relationship, guided there almost entirely by Piña’s quiet, observational clarity. She does leave them with one out — the idea that they could, in theory, start a new relationship with the same person — before delivering her real ultimatum: end it, or begin again as something else entirely.
The ending lands as both an exclamation point and a question mark — deliberately vague, deliberately loud in what it implies, and entirely dependent on whether you, the viewer, choose to read Joe and Angela’s path as hopeful or as the beginning of the end.
Ultimately, The Invite places sex squarely at the center of the conversation, but frames it as the wound in a long-tenured relationship rather than the cure — one that might, almost by accident, start to heal once someone with actual expertise points it out to them.
More than anything, this is a film about sex within the middle-aged experience, and the entire spectrum of where a person might land by the time they get there — divorced, on the verge, widowed, sexually adventurous, or some combination of all four. It seems clear that what Angela and Joe wanted was the promise of reinvigoration — some kind of sexual reawakening to jolt their marriage back to life. What they got instead was a redirection, forged entirely out of the night’s chaos rather than anything either of them planned. Whether that constitutes an epiphany or a eulogy is, fittingly, left entirely up to you.
I Want Your Sex (2026)
Release Date: July 31, 2026 (US theatrical); premiered January 23, 2026 at Sundance; digital release September 1, 2026
Runtime: 1h 30m (90 minutes)
Rated: R – for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, and pervasive language
Production Companies: Black Bear Pictures
Producers: Seth Caplan, Karley Sciortino, Gregg Araki, Teddy Schwarzman, Michael Heimler
Cinematography: Tucker Korte
Editing: Gregg Araki, Victor de la Parra
Music/Composer: James Clements
Director: Gregg Araki
Writer: Gregg Araki & Karley Sciortino
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs, Charli XCX
Where The Invite and I Want Your Sex truly overlap is in how the absence — or the presence — of sex reshapes a person entirely. In the first film, it’s Angela, middle-aged and stuck inside a relationship running on fumes. Here, it’s Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), a young gallery assistant whose entire arc becomes an education in obsession.
I Want Your Sex opens in a register lifted almost directly from Sunset Boulevard — gender roles flipped, and then flipped again in ways director Gregg Araki says went even further than he originally planned. Elliot, fresh out of college and financially scraping by, lands a job as assistant to Erika (Wilde), a renowned contemporary artist who takes him under her wing almost immediately. What starts as mentorship curdles fast into something far more sexually complicated, layered with a power dynamic neither of them is fully honest about.
Hoffman plays Elliot as naive, bashful, even diffident — a sharp contrast to Erika, who is outspoken, bold, fierce, and frequently intimidating, a total inversion of the role we just watched Wilde play across town in The Invite.
Beyond its central sex-recession-among-Gen-Z premise, Araki is also clearly interested in skewering the contemporary art world — specifically the way Erika treats her work as both a financial engine and an ego project, the two indistinguishable from one another.
Elliot is already sexually deprived by his girlfriend, Minerva (Charli XCX), which makes the timing conveniently perfect for Erika’s advances — even though the whole arrangement is obviously, uncomfortably inappropriate given the power imbalance and the workplace setting it’s happening in.
What makes pairing these two films together so compelling is how differently — and yet how similarly — they treat sexual frustration and sexual liberation. Wilde essentially represents both ends of that spectrum across the two roles. Where The Invite argues that sexual frustration only deepens relationship dysfunction, I Want Your Sex makes nearly the same argument — just a couple of generations younger, and with considerably higher stakes.
Erika spends much of the film challenging Elliot’s thinking around sex, and through her, Araki makes his sharpest generational commentary: an argument that younger generations have grown less enthusiastic about sex than the ones before them, thanks to everything from video games to prudishness, hyper-connected technology, helicopter parenting, and a paralyzing fear of getting it wrong.
But Araki’s cleverest move might be structural rather than thematic — flipping the gender dynamic of his central duo entirely. He’s said the original draft had a male boss and a naive young female assistant, and the switch felt like the more interesting version of the story. It’s also what makes the Sunset Boulevard opener land as a genuine inversion rather than a straight homage.
As the film rewinds through Elliot’s nine and a half weeks working under Erika, we watch her initiate him into a BDSM dynamic, taking control of him as her submissive — the first of several sexual awakenings Elliot experiences over the course of the film, including a “gift” from Erika that sends him to sleep with a friend of hers as a kind of birthday present.
It’s here that Elliot has his real cultural reckoning — one that can be traced partly to broader American attitudes around sex, and partly to his own stunted, misconception-riddled relationship with intimacy.
More sexual epiphanies follow: Elliot breaks up with Minerva after developing overwhelming feelings for Erika, and later finds himself in a threesome with his roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) that ends in her rejection — and a falling-out between them that never fully heals.
The film’s climax lands at Erika’s art exhibition, the culmination of the entire nine-and-a-half-week arc, which turns out to feature footage of her and Elliot’s sexual encounters, repurposed and displayed as art without his consent. Elliot confronts her mid-show; Erika, in front of everyone, pretends not to know him and has him removed from the gallery. The fallout is immediate — the exhibition becomes both a critical and commercial failure once footage of Elliot’s outburst spreads online, taking what’s left of Erika’s reputation down with it.
There’s a lot happening on nearly the same emotional register as The Invite here, as Elliot opens himself up to what sex and intimacy can actually mean — only to eventually grasp the power dynamics baked into that opening, and the manipulation Erika wielded through it the entire time.
The film’s true twist, its opening-scene-as-closing-scene structure, was — we come to learn — engineered by Erika from the start, likely with the help of her business manager, Vikktor (Daveed Diggs). Erika treats everything in her life, relationships included, as raw material for a commercial transaction. Even the film’s opening image — her staging her own drowning in the pool after drugging Elliot’s champagne and leaving him to face a murder investigation — turns out to be less a crime than an extension of her artistic philosophy: manufacture the spectacle, sell the exhibition, and let someone else absorb the real damage. In this case, that’s Elliot — left holding the genuine trauma and intimacy she manufactured purely for financial gain.
So while both films are working under the same umbrella themes of sexual frustration and sexual liberation, I Want Your Sex handles them with a sharper, more cynical edge — situating them inside a workplace and an industry, rather than a marriage. Here, sex functions as:
- A power dynamic and a manipulative tactic, one Erika wields with total fluency
- A tool for psychological control
- A commercial commodity, packaged and sold like anything else in Erika’s gallery
The film also doubles as satire of the contemporary art world throughout, but ultimately lands on a fairly blunt conclusion, at least from Erika’s vantage point: sex sells.
There’s also real generational discourse baked in — the gap between Erika’s outlook on sex and Elliot’s, and her visible impatience with a younger generation she sees as anxious, almost allergic, to real intimacy.
In the end, what Araki seems to be working through here is something closer to his own generational reckoning, filtered through Erika and Elliot’s dynamic. And for as entertaining, funny, and generationally sharp as the film plays throughout, it never lets Erika off the hook — she remains, underneath all the charisma, a deeply selfish person, even if she and Elliot land somewhere resembling a healthy relationship by the credits. She was still willing to exploit his intimacy, his emotions, and his mental health, all in service of saving her exhibition and its centerpiece.
It’s a sharp, often very funny commentary on the pretension baked into the contemporary art world and the moguls who run it — but Araki also folds in real sexual commentary throughout, arguing the two are inseparable: power, manipulation, and psychological control, dressed up as art.
Taken together, these two films — both anchored by Wilde in wildly different registers — end up saying something bigger than either one manages alone: that sex is never just sex. It’s currency, confession, weapon, and mirror, depending on who’s holding it and what they need from the person on the other side. The Invite treats it as the thing a long marriage forgot how to speak, brought back into the room by two strangers who force Angela and Joe to actually look at each other again — for better or worse, and for the sake of a daughter who has no idea how much is riding on one dinner party. I Want Your Sex treats it as leverage, dressed up in gallery lighting and a Sunset Boulevard fever dream, where the person with the most experience isn’t necessarily the one with the most wisdom to offer — just the most willingness to use what she knows.
What’s most impressive is how deliberately Wilde seems to have engineered this pairing for herself, even if she didn’t set out to build a thesis. Shooting these roles back to back, she moves from predator to prey, from starved to insatiable, without either performance ever feeling like a retread of the other. That’s not a coincidence you stumble into. That’s an actor — and, in one case, a director — who understands exactly what she’s saying about desire, at every age it’s capable of showing up.
Neither film pretends sex is simple, and neither one lets its characters off easy for wanting what they want. But side by side, The Invite and I Want Your Sex make the case that our relationship to intimacy doesn’t get less complicated as we get older or younger — it just changes shape. Whether that shape looks like a marriage quietly suffocating in a San Francisco apartment, or a young man losing himself inside someone else’s art project, Wilde is clearly interested in sitting inside that discomfort rather than resolving it neatly. In a year full of loud, box-office-shattering performances from her peers, that’s precisely what makes her work in these two films so quietly, unmistakably hers.