How does The Invite end after that swap proposal? Not the way rom-coms taught you

The Invite — the A24 dinner-party comedy where Wilde and Seth Rogen play a married couple hosting their extremely loud upstairs neighbors (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton) — spends its first hour being the funniest thing at the party. And then the proposal lands: not group sex after all, but a partner swap, right now, tonight. Here's where it goes, and it is not where the genre trained you to look.

The swap that dies of natural causes

The pairing-off happens. It also collapses almost immediately, and the collapse is the point:

• Joe (Rogen) heads to his office with Piña (Cruz), attempts a seductive dance, and falls into a bookcase. His back gives out. The mood does not survive.
• Angela (Wilde) retreats to the kitchen with Hawk (Norton) and cannot stop tidying. You cannot cheat on your husband while reorganizing the counter. It's science.
• Hawk drops his own bomb: his real name is Howard, he's a widower, and Piña is the woman who pulled him out of grief. Suddenly nobody's thinking about the swap.
• Piña, a sexologist and the only adult in the building, calls it: these two aren't ready for a foursome. They're barely ready for a conversation.

The swap isn't the scandal. The swap is the crowbar. What it pries open is a year without sex and a decade of unsaid things.

So do they stay together or what

The neighbors leave, and Joe and Angela finally talk — actually talk, no sarcasm, no audience. They say the marriage might be over. Then the film closes on the two of them at the piano, echoing the laughing, in-love couple we heard over the opening. Goodbye or reboot? Wilde refuses to pick for you, and she's said as much about the design: at the Sundance premiere, per Entertainment Weekly, her whole approach was to "let them laugh, let them relax, and then just gut-punch them with divorce."

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A rom-com would hand you the answer with a bow on it. This movie hands you a mirror and leaves. And if you think that means Wilde has gone bitter about love, she told Variety at Locarno the opposite happened: "It's melted the cynic out of me."

Rom-coms taught you the ending is a kiss. The Invite argues the ending is a question, asked at a piano, by two people who finally stopped performing.

Whether Joe and Angela make it is your homework. The movie already did its job.

Previously we wrote: Only two active athletes are billionaires — Vanessa Trump is marrying one, with $75 million of her own