A high-concept movie should never be dull enough that the audience has the time or inclination to mull over its pitch-ready premise. If a movie, say, magically teleports a stereotypical misogynist (through a knock on the head) into a purgatory where gendered social power is flipped, it should be filled with at least enough insight or humor to avoid viewers wondering if the writers had just been roused from a decades-long coma induced by a similar blow to the skull. So bad that it just had to be inspired by a French comedy (2018’s I Am Not An Easy Man, to be specific), Ladies First bludgeons its critique of sexism with the exhausted binaries of a ’90s self-help book and the low-hanging condescension of What Women Want.
If that wasn’t already enough of a reason to cancel your Netflix subscription, Ladies First stars a demonically scummy Sacha Baron Cohen as Damien, a skeevy cartoon businessman in a skeevy cartoon world about to seize the throne of his advertising agency. After a few minutes of scene-setting sexism, which includes promoting junior creative Alex (Rosamund Pike) so he’s got a token woman on his team, Damien gets struck down by the filmmaking gods, thrust into a world where it’s women who fart and sexually harass and swill beer and eat red meat and do all the other comically clichéd things that husbands in network sitcoms from 20 years ago tended to do. Given millenia of reversed gender imbalance, women have both seized the exploitative power for themselves and apparently created a world where bras are actually for balls now.
This is a reality where, get this, the virtual assistant is named “Alexo” and it’s “Burger Queen,” not “King.” Where men attend spin classes and shave their legs! There’s a whole sequence devoted to waxing, as if The 40-Year-Old Virgin hadn’t come out more than two decades ago. The needledrop of “Walk On The Wild Side” that accompanies this change is, like the rest of the film, both on-the-nose and accidentally odd; it’s a song that explicitly reminds the audience that trans and nonbinary people exist while soundtracking a moment of supernatural gender essentialism. It’s bizarre, and the Britishness of it all (the film is directed by Wicked Little Letters‘ Thea Sharrock and cobbled together by a trio of writers), not to mention some of the beaten-dead gags about manly men doing women-coded things, does give it a lingering whiff of TERF-brain. But, this could just be thoughtlessness; again, if Ladies First was anything besides aggressively off-putting, perhaps these loose connections wouldn’t be the viewer’s focus.
The new world Damien finds himself in—an apparent circle of hell specifically created for shitty men like Richard E. Grant’s homeless character, who acts as Damien’s chauvinist Virgil—is here to teach him not to suck so bad, and, it seems, to prove the cruel sense of humor of whatever grim deity watches over comedies like these. To return to the patriarchal real world, Damien must climb the rungs of corporate power once again, this time with the odds stacked against him—and (a newly madeover) Alex now his main competition. The ensuing shenanigans parade a cast of slumming heavy-hitters (Fiona Shaw, Charles Dance) going through the motions of ancient “battle of the sexes” jokes.
These hoary gags were dug out of various time capsules discovered by the writers as some sort of preservation project, or maybe as an anti-comedy thought experiment around whether you could make a few punchlines from Barbie last 84 full minutes. But as these insipid observations play out across the film’s ugly sheen, even uglier elements surface. Some, like the budding romance between Alex and Damien, are misguided in their earnestness. Others, like Damien getting a makeover in order to stand out to his objectifying women colleagues, are simply ineffective. Cohen, parading around in a tight purple suit and dyed hair, looks like a California Raisin, though his excruciating piano performance of Ginuwine’s “Pony” makes it clear that the musical talent didn’t follow.
This moment, like all the music and almost all the jokes, dates Ladies First beyond its years. The regressive studio comedies of decades past that this aspires to be were at least shot to be seen in movie theaters, with colors and contrasts. Now pandering comedies like this can’t even make a buck or two at the box office, relying instead on people falling asleep on their couches in order to autoplay. At least the filmmakers can rest easy knowing that anyone, regardless of gender, could be sleeping through their film at this very moment.
Director: Thea Sharrock
Writer: Natalie Krinsky, Cinco Paul, Katie Silberman
Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Emily Mortimer, Charles Dance, Fiona Shaw, Tom Davis, Kathryn Hunter
Release Date: May 22, 2026 (Netflix)
