Early in their acquaintanceship, Owen (Liam Hemsworth) confesses to Katherine (Laura Dern) that he doesn’t really care for travel. “People always say it’s going to be this transformative experience. Go to a new, exotic place, meet the new, exotic you,” he says. “But you get there and you’re not new or exotic. You’re just you.”
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Lonely Planet being what it is, Owen will of course be proven wrong. This trip that they’re on in Morocco, really will change their lives, specifically by tossing them into a whirlwind courtship. But if the Netflix romance depicts a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, the experience of actually watching it is decidedly more mundane. Neither dull enough to be painful nor fun enough to be engaging, it’s simply too bland to make much of an impression at all.
Actually, that’s not entirely fair. There is one thing writer-director Susannah Grant (an Oscar nominee for Erin Brockovich ) does very persuasively, and that’s pitch Morocco as a vacation destination. From the moment Katherine pulls up to her writers’ retreat, we’re guided through one postcard-ready tableau after another: luxury rooms furnished in elaborately patterned silks, majestic ruins steeped in centuries of history, pretty streets lined with watercolor-blue walls. The views from the kasbah, nestled deep in the hills outside Marrakech, are uniformly spectacular. As fellow attendee Lily (Diana Silvers) gasps to Owen, the finance-bro boyfriend she’s brought along for the ride: “You can see forever.”
Sure, there’s the occasional inconvenience, including car engine trouble and a minor bout of food poisoning. But even those setbacks turn out to be blessings in disguise — by which I mean romance narrative contrivances so clunky, I briefly wondered if Lonely Planet might reveal itself to be a much weirder movie about a hostess toying with her guests’ love lives for her own nefarious ends. (It isn’t. Alas.)
Though Katherine has come in a desperate attempt to finish her novel, she’s forced out of her room when she discovers the faucet isn’t working and she has no water. Though Owen’s just there to support Lily, spotty cell service forces him outside as well. The pair seem mutually intrigued from the moment their eyes meet; they strike up a fast friendship that inevitably blossoms into something more.
Ostensibly, Katherine and Owen are drawn together by the instant and ineffable ease they feel with one another. Really, though, what seems to unite them is the fact that they’re otherwise surrounded by assholes, Lily included.
Lonely Planet ’s depiction of elite authors could count as scathing satire if the film had a sharper knack for detail, or any sense of humor. When these scribes aren’t falling all over themselves to flatter one another, they’re openly sneering at Owen for failing to remember the name of a character from Great Expectations . Only Katherine treats him with basic courtesy, let alone genuine interest in his thoughts, his feelings, his high school memories, his current work problems. (Though in fairness, even he doesn’t seem all that interested in his own private equity job.)
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Otherwise, the pair share only a mild and inconsistent chemistry. Katherine is written without much in the way of a personality, but the ever-reliable Dern is nevertheless able to anchor her in an earthy sort of charm. Owen is even more sketchily drawn, perhaps because he’s really just the vessel for her desires, and Hemsworth is less capable of making the character his own. To the end, it’s a role that feels like it could have been played by any other conventionally handsome 30something dude in Hollywood.
Together, they come across like two nice enough people having a nice enough time, but hardly a deep or passionate one. Even their climactic love scenes are less than stimulating, given that both leads are buried in so much shadow and choppy editing I found myself wondering how much of them were being performed by body doubles. Then again, closeups aren’t really the film’s strong suit either. Whether due to a trick of lighting, makeup or actual VFX work, there are moments when the actors look so airbrushed as to seem not quite real.
But such halfheartedness seems part and parcel with the rest of the film, which makes almost no effort to imagine Owen and Katherine’s worlds outside their connection. Though there are one or two scenes set after the trip, we spend no time in the characters’ real homes or with their non-vacation friends. (Indeed, I’m not sure we ever actually learn what cities they live in.) Heck, despite the fact that Katherine’s writer’s block is the catalyst for this entire adventure, we don’t even get to learn what kind of books she writes — just that they’re critically acclaimed and commercially successful.
In broad strokes, Lonely Planet fits right in with this year’s mini-trend of older woman-younger boyfriend romances, alongside The Idea of You , A Family Affair and the upcoming Babygirl . And though it never directly addresses the age gap, it does technically deliver on the dream of meeting a hot young thing who gets you intellectually, emotionally and sexually in a way no one else ever has.
But the real wish fulfillment it’s selling is a far sillier one. It’s of getting to be that “new and exotic” person you become while traveling for good, without the pesky realities of your back-home life ever truly getting in the way. It is, in short, a fantasy that you might get to live in your vacation forever. Maybe even in balmy, beautiful Morocco.
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