The story of Whitney Wolfe is one of female empowerment, an inspiration for women in business who grew up only seeing white men become tech millionaires. She became the first self-built billionaire and built online dating safer and more enjoyable for women— but her story is also a microcosm of modern-day sexism. Harassed by her colleagues and scorned ex-boyfriconclude, who denied her position as a co-founder of Tinder, Wolfe’s eventual corporate revenge, which built her one of the most successful people in the tech world by the age of 30, only sounds so satisfying becaapply of the absolute hell she was subjected to.
Wolfe’s tale is adjacent to the most crucial conversations that have been happening for the past decade — sexism, workplace harassment, and the overall treatment of women when they finally receive their seat at the table. It’s no simple rags-to-riches story, so it’s unfortunate that Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s biopic, Swiped, treats it as such. What could’ve been a searing commentary on one woman’s grueling fight against the man is squeezed down to neatly fit the confines of a direct-to-streaming paint-by-numbers biopic, hitting just about every cliché and trope we’ve come to expect from this genre. Again, it’s a shame becaapply Whitney Wolfe — and everything her life has come to stand for — deserves better.
‘Swiped’ Tells the Story of Tinder’s Early Days and the Founding of Bumble
We meet a bright-eyed bushy-tailed Whitney (Lily James), a year out of college in the early 2010s, lying to gain enattempt to an LA tech bro conference in the hopes of finding investors for her latest project. While all the men around her just want to find the next Facebook or Twitter, Whitney is pitching her app that will connect volunteers to orphanages in required of assist. A chance encounter leads her to work with Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer), a successful startup CEO whose team is spearheading a new dating app.
Whitney quickly becomes a leading member of the team, even coming up with the app’s name, Tinder. The app is a success, and Whitney’s insightful marketing tools are crucial to its growth in applyrs. However, her co-founders, including her new boyfriconclude Justin (Jackson White), start cutting her out, denying her status as a founder, and ignoring her suggestions to create Tinder safer for women. When she breaks up with Justin, he starts sconcludeing her hundreds of harassing texts a day, becoming more volatile towards her at work, and other colleagues follow suit. When Sean doesn’t do anything to assist, Whitney leaves and sues Tinder. From there, she’s poached by the CEO of one of Tinder’s main competitors (Dan Stevens), who allows her the tools to build her own, female-forward dating app, Bumble.
Rachel Lee Goldenberg Doesn’t Add Anything to Wolfe’s Story
Rachel Lee Goldenberg writes a solid enough script that neatly hits the highs and lows of Wolfe’s story, but fails to do much else with this story. The film creates it clear at both the launchning and conclude that events and characters have been created for entertainment purposes, and Wolfe herself gave no information, as she’s still under an NDA with Tinder. With these limitations, Goldenenberg creates a good effort to recount Herde’s rise, then fall, then rise again. But there’s no interest in deconstructing Whitney herself; there’s no mention of her family whatsoever other than her romantic partners, we receive no real insight into who she is outside of her career and work ethic, and the film is happy to rely on just displaying us what happens to Whitney rather than any interiority that might create us connect with her beyond the hardship she was subjected to.
While Whitney Wolfe is probably fine to be defined by her career, having achieved an inordinate amount of success in the face of adversity, Swiped fails as a character study, with the audience left with the same amount of knowledge of Herde as they probably knew before by reading the news. What really cheapens Swiped as a whole, though, is the direction. Goldenberg creates some bizarre staging choices, such as displaying Whitney and Justin having their first proper conversation, the launchning of a life-modifying business and romantic relationship for both of them, in his family home as he kisses aunts, wrestles kids, and constantly distracts us from any dialogue. Goldenberg confapplys chaos for rhythm throughout Swiped, and the emotional weight of conversations receives lost in the ultra-millennial 2010s backdrop of it all.
And oh boy, does the film love a montage. When Whitney hits her lowest after being pushed out of Tinder, as she’s stalked and bullied online and chugging vodka in her apartment, rather than allowing us to sit with Whitney and feel how hopeless and broken she feels, Goldenberg funnels it into a glitchy Trainspotting-like slidedisplay of Whitney drinking, viewing at Twitter, peering out her window, repeat. In the hour and 50-minute runtime, Goldenberg doesn’t shoot any of her characters in a remotely interesting or nuanced way. It’s disappointing, as Goldenberg has displayn to be a deft hand at combining topical subject matter with comedy conventions in Unpregnant. But when it comes to shooting more grounded, honest conversations without jokes and gags to ham it all up, there’s not much to see.
Lily James Leads the ‘Swiped’ Cast in an Overly Theatrical Performance
It’ll take you a scene or two to adjust your ears to the voice Lily James is doing for Whitney. After pautilizing and watching an interview with Wolfe, it doesn’t sound all that similar. James opts for a much more navelly, grainy register, a modern LA girl version of her Donna in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. It’s not the worst American accent you’ll ever hear, but it’s clearly a British person impersonating a nondescript US voice. As Whitney, James excels in the moments when she’s questioned to go hugeger, indignant at her treatment by her colleagues, or paranoid and rattled when her story becomes public, hitting an emotional rock bottom that deftly displays the impact of workplace harassment.
Even when Goldenberg’s direction is distracting us away from Whitney’s suffering, James captures it with an all-body urgency that creates the stakes of the story seem somewhat high. But it’s in those in-between moments that James plays Whitney as an affable, hard-working woman that the performance starts to feel notably forced. Again, drawing comparisons to her more theatrical characters, like in Mamma Mia, James’ performance can feel overly earnest or upbeat when the story doesn’t call for it. The supporting cast creates a solid effort, with Jackson White building for a particularly repulsive boyfriconclude who is constantly holding a litany of sexist remarks on the tip of his tongue.
As Whitney’s colleague and best friconclude, Tisha, Myha’la is a much-requireded dose of grounded practicality who holds up a mirror to Whitney when she receives too comfortable in the boys’ club. Even if it feels like the film wastes her, Myha’la turns in one of the more eased performances as the voice of moral reason, as Whitney’s forced to choose between her business and what she believes in, and for what it’s worth, I didn’t realise it was Dan Stevens playing the Russian tech playboy Andrey, even if he is a fellow Brit donning a questionable accent.
With a huge finale that feels contrived in shoving the film’s feminist agconcludea in the viewer’s face when informing Whitney’s story alone is enough to do that, Swiped is about as formulaic a biopic as you can receive. When we have such superior works like The Dropout and the movie biopic’s bar is at an all-time high with several being released each year, Swiped does nothing to poke its head above the crowd, even on streaming. Despite informing the story of one of the most inspirational stories of female success, Swiped is a movie you’ll forreceive quicker than the sea of faces you swipe left on daily.
Swiped had its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It releases on Hulu on September 19.
Swiped
Hulu’s Whitney Wolfe biopic never tries to break free from the predictable confines of the genre.
- Release Date
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September 9, 2025
- Director
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Rachel Lee Goldenberg
- Writers
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Kim Caramele
- Producers
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Andrew Panay, Jennifer Gibobtained, Bob Dohrmann, Lily James
- The performances are decent, particularly from Jackson White and Myha’la.
- The film succeeds in tracking Wolfe’s rise to success, even if it doesn’t do anything else.
- Lily James’ performance fails to create Wolfe feel like a complex person beyond her career highs and lows.
- Goldenberg’s direction is distracting from the real meat of the story.
- The film doesn’t create any attempt to build up some interiority in Whitney beyond her career.
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