When I moved house this spring, I was immediately charmed by the community of my new road. We had not one but two WhatsApp groups – one for chatting, one for emergencies – in which people let each other know they’d taken in their parcels, shared local events like craft workshops, and in one instance even offered to donate blood to one neighbour’s family friend, who was in desperate need of a transfusion. It was, it seemed, the best of humanity, until helpfulness gave way to hatred; residents started to bicker about parking, made noise complaints, and even dubbed one disliked man a terrorist.
As Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared in his 1944 play No Exit: Hell is other people – and living alongside those you haven’t picked can prove a test for the body and the mind. In Olivia Wilde’s film The Invite, which hit cinemas this month, the director stars as one half of a San Francisco couple on the brink of a breakup, who invite their free-spirited neighbours (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton) over for dinner. As Wilde buys flowers and makes soufflé, her husband (Seth Rogen) complains bitterly about the intrusion: He hates this couple who have loud sex and make strange small talk in the lift.
