‘Swiped’ Review: Lily James in Hulu’s Unconvincingly Uplifting Biopic of a Dating App Founder

To start, you might mistake Swiped, the new film from Unpregnant director Rachel Lee Goldenberg, for a rom-com. A plucky young woman sneaks her way into an exclusive party where, after a mostly frustrating evening, she finally hits it off with a cutie at the valet stand. They banter about LA techie types and fake-sounding names; unlike all the other guys we’ve seen hit on her earlier, he actually asks her questions and listens when she answers.

Swiped, however, is no sweet little love story. It is, instead, a biopic centered around an invention that’s either facilitated a lot of real-life meet-cutes or brought about the death of them, depending on how much luck you’ve had on the dating apps. But while the Hulu release ultimately adopts a tone of triumph, its themes of empowerment ring hollow coming from such a thinly written script. It’s most persuasive as a portrait of the frequently toxic culture surrounding those apps to begin with.

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Our protagonist, played by Lily James, is Whitney Wolfe, who will eventually go on to become the billionaire founder of Bumble. At the beginning of the film, though, she’s just a fresh college graduate looking for a foot in the door. The man she’s met is Sean (Ben Schnetzer), the co-founder of a moderately successful incubator. He wants not to date this ambitious would-be entrepreneur but to hire her.

Initially, the job seems a dream come true. Swiped unfolds in the 2010s, right at the height of the tech boom, and production designer Hillary Gurtler recreates the then-trendy look of offices made to resemble adult-sized playgrounds, decked out with tube slides and ping pong tables and populated by sloppily attired young people. Whitney makes herself instrumental in the launch of Tinder, and is rewarded for her hard work with effusive praise and a flashy title bump. She meets her best friend there (Tisha, played by Industry’s Myha’la), and starts dating another co-founder (Justin, played by Tell Me Lies’ Jackson White).

But the good times sour when the romance does. The script, written by Bill Parker and Goldenberg with Kim Carmele, is most effective at the “fall” part of Whitney’s rise-fall-rise arc, brought about not by any egregious wrongdoing on her part but by a culture built to insulate certain types of people (i.e., white men) at the expense of everyone else. The tech guys might talk a big game about disruption, but good old-fashioned misogyny is everywhere in their world, from the sales meetings where prospective clients seem more interested in flirting with Whitney than listening to her pitch, to casual office conversations about the relative hotness of women whose photos have been uploaded to the app.

Eventually, it’s also in the way Whitney is treated by Justin, who talks over her to important investors and gossips about their relationship and, post-breakup, escalates to icing her out of meetings and threatening her at work events. It’s in the grossness of the app itself, which attracts an increasing number of complaints from female users about abusive messages and unsolicited dick pics. (“I think most of these chicks are just reporting harassment on guys who reject them,” a male exec scoffs when the issue is raised.) Swiped provokes real indignation with the way Whitney is treated by the company she once helped build, which now sets about pushing her out and then tarnishing her reputation for good measure.

It is somewhat less compelling at depicting Whitney’s rise back out from the ashes. Swiped is rock-solid in its case that, as Whitney explains, “the rules of online behavior have been written exclusively by men,” and Whitney’s aspiration to bring about a genuine sea change is an admirable one. On an abstract level it’s easy to cheer for the formation of Bumble, an app explicitly designed to offer a less toxic experience for female users.

But her path there feels too pat and too linear. It’s stuffed with biopic clichés, like the moment when she interrupts her own impassioned rant mid-sentence because she’s struck by a eureka moment, and over-reliant on montages that let years fly by in the blink of an eye. The first half, at least, finds some interesting complexity in Whitney’s growing disillusionment with both her job and her romantic relationship, as well as her complicity in the very environment that would eventually chew her up and spit her out. The second charts an ascent so relatively frictionless that it feels like a fantasy, turning Whitney from an imperfect protagonist into an untouchable heroine.

James sells the evolution as best she can, but it’s telling that the more compelling performance in the later parts of the movie come from an unrecognizable Dan Stevens in a supporting role as Andrey Andreev, a disarmingly funny and oddly charming Russian investor. It’s in his character that Swiped still feels like a story about actual human beings in all their flaws and maddening contradictions. Otherwise, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re only scratching the surface of a story that surely must be more complicated than the straightforwardly uplifting girlboss fable it’s being packaged and sold to us as.