SWIPED (TIFF) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
The drama Swiped peeks behind the scenes of the dating app Tinder, where a bright young woman who helped launch its success finds she can’t “swipe left” on the misogyny and sexism.
Unfortunately, viewers might want to “swipe left” on this film. In portraying the career of Whitney Wolfe Herd, who weathered a scandal after Tinder to become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, the film skims over a lot. It feels like flipping through several browser windows without reading them.
Swiped premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and airs on Hulu this month. At first blush, it shares some Silicon Valley DNA with The Dropout, Hulu’s limited dramatic series about the biotechnology company Theranos and its disgraced founder, Elizabeth Holmes, played by Golden Globe-winner Amanda Seyfried.
However, The Dropout took eight episodes to examine Holmes as a character and document her company’s downfall. Swiped takes an hour and 50 minutes and could’ve benefitted from a better focus, given all it attempts to cover.
We first meet Herd (Lily James, Relay) as a new college graduate feigning her way into a swanky party, seeking funding to launch an app that would connect volunteers with orphanages. No one bites, mistaking her for one of the pretty faces hired to chat up the guests, if not dismissing her altogether.
The dejected Herd’s luck turns around when she meets Sean (Ben Schnetzer, 3 Body Problem), a tech CEO who soon offers her a marketing job. She’s reluctant to accept at first, but Sean tells her it’s better to affect change from a position of power. While there’s some truth to that, Herd never seems to circle back to her initial impulse. Goodbye, orphans. Hello, payday.
Herd helps launch Tinder by returning to her alma mater and convincing fraternities and sororities to sign up. Sean names her a cofounder, just as her office romance with another cofounder, Justin (Jackson White, Tell Me Lies), takes off. Director Rachel Lee Goldenberg (Minx) captures the excitement of Tinder’s success through quick cuts of news reports, parties, and playtime in a workplace full of ping-pong, spiral slides, and other ways to spark creativity. Hits like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” accompany the skyrocketing success.
But the film starts to weave off-track once Justin becomes verbally abusive, and Sean sides with his buddy, costing Herd a job. The script by Bill Parker (Unpregnant), Goldenberg, and Kim Caramele (Inside Amy Schumer) introduces a female Forbes reporter (Coral Peña, For All Mankind) assigned to look into online dating who doesn’t impact the plot until much later. Meanwhile, Swiped only glances at the behind-the-scenes toxicity of the tech-bro environment, with Tisha (Myha’la, Industry), Herd’s friend and coworker, pointing out the harassment women say they’ve experienced on the app. Herd squirms over addressing this with Sean and the other guys, saying she has to “bring it up a certain way.”
The film notes that Herd is under a nondisclosure agreement and didn’t participate in the making of Swiped, which could explain some gaps, such as how Herd was fortunate enough to catch the eye of Andrey (Dan Stevens, Love, Death & Robots, sporting a French accent), another tech CEO who cosigns her vision for the female-focused dating app Bumble. Yet as Swiped hopscotches through Bumble’s success, it also breezes by Herd’s advocacy against online harassment and her ignorance about Andrey’s own problematic behavior.
James is likeable enough, and Swiped deserves credit for having Tisha call out Herd for not wanting to rock the boat when the system benefits her. But without tracking Herd’s growth in a significant way, the “girl power” denouement and Herd’s lessons learned ring hollow.
