Olivia Wilde just revealed all the sneaky details on The Invite set you definitely missed

If you’ve already seen The Invite and thought the apartment was making you feel weird for no obvious reason, that’s because it absolutely was.

The new A24 comedy, directed by and starring Olivia Wilde, follows long-married couple Joe and Angela, whose relationship has completely run out of steam. In a bid to shake things up, they invite their much more adventurous neighbours Piña and Hawk over for dinner. Unsurprisingly, things spiral very, very quickly.

Although the film spends almost all of its runtime inside one apartment, that wasn’t just because it was convenient. According to Olivia Wilde, every room and almost every design choice was carefully planned to tell you something about the characters long before they admit it themselves.

Speaking about creating the apartment with production designer Jade Healy, Wilde told Architectural Digest: “Jade and I immediately knew we wanted to allow for private spaces for the characters to have separate experiences.”

“The use of structure to represent boundaries slowly falling away was really exciting to us. ‘Frames within frames’ became a mantra of ours. Mirrors were our favorite tool for many practical editorial reasons, but also to represent how two people can share a space without seeing each other.”

The colour palette also wasn’t random. Throughout Angela and Joe’s home, the walls are painted in muted blue-greens. The colder colours are meant to reflect the emotional distance between the couple, while also suggesting they’re both slowly drowning under the weight of their failing marriage.

Joe’s office is painted an even darker shade, to show just how deeply stuck he really is.

Even the bedroom tells part of the story.

Production designer Jade Healy explained: “The bedroom is the state of her marriage with Joe. I imagine the bed was something they bought a long time ago when they didn’t have much money and it’s not something they care about.”

She also revealed there was a symbolic crack built into one of the walls.

“I wanted that crack in the wall to be symbolic of the fracture in their relationship. Maybe the camera didn’t catch it, but the actors definitely did.”

The film has already become one of A24’s biggest recent releases, expanding from just seven cinemas to more than 1,600 locations in its third week. If you’re planning a rewatch, it might be worth paying as much attention to the apartment as you do to the dinner party.

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Featured image credit: A24