Swiped (2018)

Swiped arrives in 2018 with the weary confidence of a film that believes it has discovered something about smartphones. James, a computer genius of the freshman variety, is recruited by his roommate Lance to build Jungle, an app engineered for no-strings campus encounters. The premise has teeth. The execution has dentures. What follows is a coming-of-age romance in which the machinery of modern courtship is blamed for a generation's emotional shallowness, and then everyone kisses and goes home.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is largely a period piece of its own moment. Ann Deborah Fishman writes and directs, and a sorority house provides a temporary sanctuary, which lends the proceedings a faint female-centric tilt. The tilt does not extend to argument. The story remains a conventional pursuit: a boy confesses, a girl relents. The cast is predominantly white, with Shein Mompremier's Melody drifting through in a supporting capacity that the script never troubles to explain, and never needs to. Race, sexuality, the climate, the body, the mind, and the economy all go unexamined. The hookup app is treated as a personal failing, not a corporate one. There is no sermon against capital, no reckoning with desire beyond the heteronormative default.

The film does sermonize, briefly, at the end. James urges his classmates to delete the apps and speak to each other in person, a moral delivered with the soft thud of a fortune cookie. It is light, conventional, and entirely survivable. The result is a film that wants credit for noticing that phones are cold and people are warm, a thesis it states once and then abandons for a kiss. Twenty percent on Rotten Tomatoes feels about right, though the tomatoes were not grading on ideology. They were grading on craft, and craft, like Jungle, has been taken down.