Some fears transcend language, transcend cultures. The howl of a wolf, the scream of a hawk, or the doorbell ring of neighbors you invited over but now wish would go away.

The uncanny mix of attraction, resentment, jealousy, and annoyance felt toward those we only hear through floorboards and glimpse in elevators is at the center of the droll apartment farce The Invite. The low-budget comedy debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and, thanks to good word of mouth, emerged as an unexpected summer hit alongside special effects blockbusters like Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. It is now available to stream in North America, and as you’ll see, it’s a tale that echoes around the world.

The Invite takes place over one night and is set almost entirely in one location—a desirable-but-not-ostentatious San Francisco apartment in a sonically porous building. The apartment is owned by a jaded music instructor who has abandoned his rock star dreams (we learn he inherited the pad from his parents) played by Seth Rogen, and his deeply unhappy wife played by Olivia Wilde (who is also the director of the film). There’s an early-teens daughter in the mix, but she’s luckily away for the night, so Wilde’s character has sprung a surprise dinner party on her husband. The neighbors, the ones they talk about constantly, are coming over.

The ongoing spousal chatter, which is partially a source of shared humor but mostly a wellspring of deeply held animus, comes from the upstairs couple’s regular and thunderous lovemaking sessions—a matrimonial hobby we’ll soon learn the downstairs couple have long since quit. The upstairs duo is played by Edward Norton, a kind but devilish firefighter, and Spanish actor Penélope Cruz, a ravishing, earthy therapist who exudes continental sophistication and excitement.

In short time, the downstairs couple reveal themselves to be a bickering, miserable mess, but they briefly put aside their sniping when the upstairs couple shares that they are swingers, and the sleep-depriving sounds come from group sex adventures with a revolving door of participants. As the evening continues, the titular invite comes—would Rogen and Wilde’s characters, neurotic sourpusses though they may be, care to join Norton and Cruz’s for an intimate interlude?

The movie is extremely funny, but also insightful and sad, thanks to a sharp screenplay by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, as well as all four of the performances—especially Wilde, who skitters between debilitating insecurity, marital revulsion, and brazen lust, sometimes all within the same shot. She’s given life-or-death stakes to what could otherwise be a diverting filmed play, aided by rapid editing and a tension-rich original score by Devonté Hynes. The movie is a highwire act, and during the promotional cycle, she regularly cited the influence of Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a key New Hollywood text.

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Wilde’s references to Nichols are certainly apt, but deviate from a more exact comparison: The Invite is a remake of a recent Spanish film, The People Upstairs (also called Sentimental), which writer-director Cesc Gay adapted from his own play.

The People Upstairs came out in 2020 and between then and Wilde’s film’s release, there were four (yes, four) other versions of this story produced—in Switzerland, Italy, South Korea, and France. (A Belgian/Dutch version is en route.) While international remakes are not uncommon, I feel confident in saying that what’s happened with Gay’s work is unprecedented both in its speed and numbers.

In the early days of “talking pictures,” one could sometimes find business-minded producers who would crank out alternates of a movie using the same sets and crew but (usually) different actors in different languages for foreign markets. Most of these iterations are now considered lost films, but several are notable.

The all-star revue Paramount on Parade from 1930 holds the record with 13 different variants, including ones in Hungarian and Serbian. When Alfred Hitchcock shot Murder! in 1930, he stayed in the director’s chair for the German version, released as Mary in 1931. (He was used to this sort of thing, having filmed both the silent and talking versions of Blackmail in 1929.)

Translations went the other way, too. An English version of Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 classic The Blue Angel starring Marlene Dietrich was considered lost for decades until a copy was found in a German archive and presented in 2009.

The most celebrated example is George Melford’s Spanish-language Dracula from 1931, which was shot at night (spooky!) after Bela Lugosi and director Tod Browning left Universal’s stages. That English-language Dracula gave us iconic lines like “I never drink … wine,” and was, of course, an instant classic, but if you have hours to kill, I recommend visiting film snob message boards to see how many cinephiles are eager to argue that the Spanish Dracula is greatly superior. (I say they are both good!)

But there’s a key difference between then and now. The profusion of versions of The People Upstairs does not represent a production entity looking to maximize profit. It is an organic recognition of a story with legs across different cultures.

From a practical standpoint, one can see why local film industries, still wobbly from COVID safety protocols in the early part of this decade, would want to sink their teeth into a one-location movie with just four performers. Quick and easy. But those mechanics aside, what does it say about the world that so many of us are understood to be interested in sex-deprived married couples thunderstruck by their lustful neighbors?

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Of the six versions of this film that now exist, only the original Spanish and current Hollywood versions are easily found in North America. But leaping across borders is what we at Foreign Policy are all about. After many rounds of emails, Instagram DMs, and the deployment of some translation software, I am proud to say that I have seen each rendition.

I immersed myself in this tale of would-be spouse-swapping hoping to learn more about specific cultures. Whether or not my discoveries are truly foundational to a national character is open to discussion, but pages and pages of notes show that this exercise was, if nothing else, fascinating. For starters, I now know that German-speaking Swiss are more into slapstick than I was previously aware, if Die Nachbarn von Oben (The Neighbors From Upstairs) director Sabine Boss is a true representative.

Like Brahms interpreting Handel, some scenes of Cesc Gay’s original Spanish film only exist in the bones of each variation, but a few melodic lines remain constant. All six versions retain the reveal that the downstairs woman intentionally crosses her unshaded window while naked, knowing that the upstairs man is likely looking at her. Similarly, she urges her husband not to complain about the lovemaking upstairs because she is happy that the upstairs woman is having such aggressive orgasms—and Wilde is terrified that discussing it will ruin it for her. (This is played as a joke.) There’s also a big laugh across all six versions when the invitation comes, and the downstairs woman starts verbally going through her calendar, causing the downstairs man to complain that it isn’t normal to schedule an orgy.

In the Hollywood version, Cruz’s exoticism comes from her Iberian origins, and she even brings over a flan. No other version makes her a foreigner, and in the Spanish, Swiss, and Italian versions, she makes an unspecified Indian dish that is spicy and (the upstairs man jokes) an aphrodisiac. In the French version, she makes “tapas,” and in the South Korean version, some kind of elaborate fried eggplant on a cake stand with a bow on it.

Music comes up a lot. In the Hollywood film, the downstairs husband is a frustrated rock musician. In Spain and Switzerland, his repertoire is classical piano; in Italy, it is jazz. In South Korea, he’s not a musician at all, but a film director stuck in years of development on a television project he isn’t that enthusiastic about to begin with.

The South Korean film (also called The People Upstairs) is the version with some of the bigger changes. For starters, the downstairs neighbors do not have kids or a pet. (The French version includes not just a daughter, but a pivotal dog.) Moreover, the upstairs sex-positive neighbors are deliberately cast as older and more conservatively dressed. Indeed, the upstairs woman looks like a newscaster and the upstairs man initially comes across as a bit of a dork, wearing a cardigan with ducks on it.

Each version shows that the downstairs man has an office, but the South Korean spin strongly suggests that it functions as his nightly bedroom. There’s a gag in each film when the downstairs couple admits how long it has been since they last made love. Most versions, including the Rogen-Wilde version, say “about a year.” But the South Korean couple say four years. (The French version evades the question with, “I can’t even remember the last time.”)

Indeed, the two ends of the sexuality spectrum are represented by South Korea and France. In every version, when the upstairs neighbors talk about their group sex encounters, they say they usually limit them to four to six people, except one time when there was 10 for someone’s birthday. (This builds to a variation of a “well, birthdays are special” joke.) The French version keeps this gag but doubles the number: There were 20 participants one New Year’s Eve, apparently.

There’s also a funny moment where the upstairs neighbors talk about sexual boundaries and proclivities, with some versions getting more lewd than others. (Quite frankly, the Hollywood version may be the dirtiest of them all.) In multiple versions, the upstairs man declares that his partner is fond of anal sex, and she plain-facedly confirms it. But the South Korean version includes dialogue about enjoying sex “Korean style.” (Here I must tell you, reader, that I have no clue what this means. Furthermore, asking Google “what is Korean-style sex” did nothing but poison my algorithm such that I can no longer use my laptop at the public library. We’re just going to have to accept that not everything translates.)

All six versions of the movie build to their conclusion by raising the stakes in different ways. Seth Rogen’s back gives out in the Hollywood version; in the Swiss film, there’s a piano on fire then drunken nakedness. The French version, however, has a wild twist: The off-screen daughter isn’t a preteen at a friend’s sleepover, but a 20-year-old who only comes back from school now and again. It is soon discovered that a particularly noisy night of lovemaking came from the upstairs man seducing her. (To his credit, he didn’t realize who she was.)

While this leads to expected anger from the downstairs man, the upstairs woman is also upset—because she wasn’t involved. “We’re supposed to be libertines together!” she cries. (The downstairs woman, the mother of the seduced, isn’t too bothered by the story at all, for what it’s worth.)

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Across the six films, the story ends with the downstairs couple confronting the fact that their marriage has collapsed, and the next step—separation—is presented as a reasonable, maybe even happy, ending. The big question is whether or not they go through with it or stay in their rut. All versions are ambiguous. The Spanish, Swiss, and Italian versions suggest rapprochement. (I’ve barely mentioned the Italian version, simply called Neighbors, because it’s pretty boring—though it does feature the nicest apartment.) The French and Hollywood versions lean more toward a breakup, but suggest that, in deciding to do so, the couple will grow in maturity and maybe even deepen their friendship.

The South Korean version is the true outlier—our younger couple downstairs seems to be quite happy, and maybe, just maybe, has gotten there thanks to their new hobby of swinging. If and when that version (called The People Upstairs, for future reference) ever becomes more widely available, you can watch it and judge for yourself.