Lonely Planet review - Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth heat up beach-read travel romance

Be it a quirk of timing or the invisible hand of trend cycles, Hollywood seems ready to reconsider the idea of the “older woman”. A wave of age-gap romances have brought the traditionally objectified mommy-age lover into the mainstream this year, including Anne Hathaway’s tryst with a boybander in The Idea of You; Carol Kane’s free-spirited grandmother involved with a decades-younger widower in Between the Temples; and Nicole Kidman’s transgressive dalliances in both A Family Affair (with Zac Efron’s movie star) and the forthcoming Babygirl (with Harris Dickinson’s intern). And that’s not to mention the weirder, psychosexual French version – a 50ish lawyer seducing her gangly teenage stepson – in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer.

Now Lonely Planet, a Netflix film from Susannah Grant, writer of Erin Brockovich and most recently the co-creator of the underrated series Unbelievable, continues what Vulture’s Rachel Handler has termed “the year of New Milf Cinema” with a travel romance that exceeds Netflix’s middling expectations.

Catherine Lowe, a professionally successful though personally devastated novelist played by Laura Dern, is not, as far as we know, a mother. Parenthood doesn’t come up in Lonely Planet, which is predominantly, and sometimes fruitfully, concerned with people’s double-edged relationships to work and/or individual purpose. But Catherine is a woman of a certain age, beyond that which society typically deems sexually viable or even just valuable. And she’s reckoning with a mid-life crisis – divorce, rejection, creative stagnancy, what’s next? – via a writers’ retreat in Morocco and a norms-breaking attraction to a decades-younger man.

As expected, Catherine is internally ruffled though outwardly unimpressed by Owen (Liam Hemsworth), the hunky, charming and quietly disillusioned plus-one of another writer at the retreat. Owen is accordingly turned on by Catherine’s apparent lack of interest in him. She spends the bulk of their first interactions ignoring him in favour of her past-due novel, and the film features its fair share of Dern dressed enviably in fit trousers and linens, looking frustrated while pecking at screens (complimentary).

Related: From The Idea of You to A Family Affair: the summer of age-gap romances

For reasons we can chalk up to chemistry and the magic of new places, Owen is drawn to Catherine’s solitary workaholism while repelled by his girlfriend Lily Kemp’s (Booksmart’s Diana Silvers) similar ambitions and writerly pretensions. Lily is a character designed to make female viewers jealous: model-thin, gorgeous, an overnight literary success for her “glorified beach read” debut novel despite having never published anything before. She admires Catherine and is thus believably awkward with her; Catherine, also believably, rebuffs Lily’s advances while finding new ways to connect with her boyfriend. For his part, Owen, a high-school quarterback turned New York finance bro who does not read books, feels out of place.

These characters are all in some way aspirational, though not particularly admirable. Owen and Catherine repeat the phrase “new and exotic” about Morocco a few too many times for comfort – lamenting how travel does not actually take you far from yourself, while bonding over an impromptu visit to a local village. Owen makes a passing effort to interact with Lily; Lily barely hides how boring she finds him, and is clearly taken with Rafih (Younès Boucif), who “wrote that beautiful memoir about his time as a child soldier in Libya!” (lol). All three of them are at times oblivious and self-absorbed and they say laughably on-the-nose things, particularly as Owen develops a moral conscience about private equity screwing over a family-owned coalmine in West Virginia.

Yet Lonely Planet proves to be smarter and more attentive than its beach-read feint. The film features plenty of tourism-ad footage of Morocco, from Marrakech to Chaouen, that elevates it above the overlit Netflix canon. But it also undercuts its own exoticism with a short and effective montage of service workers at the retreat cleaning up beer bottles, trash and a discarded bra after the group’s nightly revelry. All the character flaws, paradoxically, give heft to a likable central romance between two easily dislikable people, who are filmed with a winsome naturalness, and blurred edges like their tipsy circling of each other. Both Dern and Hemsworth bring their requisite qualities (luminous, layered neuroticism, sad eyes and abs) to the pairing, which feels spiky, surprising and tender, up to and including a very female gaze-y sex scene on the dresser.

Until the rushed conclusion, which dives headlong into improbable romance, Lonely Planet thankfully avoids soapy dramatics, preferring realistic breakdowns in communication, though I wish the envy between Catherine and Lily were a little better explored. Still, it’s better, more grounded and self-aware than expected, enough to overcome the cliches and occasionally clunky dialogue. It’s a mostly enjoyable addition to the welcome sub-genre about 40-plus, desiring women as considered, desirable subjects.

• Lonely Planet is on Netflix from 11 October