Ladies First Review: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Ladies First deserves credit for attempting a satire on sexism and workplace misogyny, but the film quickly runs out of fresh ideas. Rosamund Pike shines throughout, yet the repetitive humour and painfully obvious writing make this Netflix comedy more exhausting than entertaining.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Director: Thea Sharrock
Platform: Netflix
Language: English
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw, Richard E. Grant, Charles Dance
Imagine someone tells you a joke. It is actually a pretty good joke. You laugh. Then they tell you the same joke again. You smile politely. Then again. You check your watch. Then again, louder this time, as if volume is the missing ingredient. By the fourth repetition, the joke has ceased to exist as a joke and become something else entirely — a test of patience, perhaps, or a social experiment in endurance.
“That is ‘Ladies First’ in a sentence.” Ninety minutes of the same joke, growing louder and less funny with each retelling.
The setup is legitimately promising. Damien Sachs — played by Sacha Baron Cohen — is a smug, self-satisfied advertising executive who treats women as office furniture: present, occasionally useful, never taken seriously. He is the kind of man who interrupts female colleagues mid-sentence, dismisses their ideas until a man repeats them, and considers himself entirely reasonable while doing it. After a head injury, he wakes up in an alternate reality where every social structure is reversed. Women run everything. Men are the decorative, underpaid, objectified ones. The world Damien confidently occupied has been flipped upside down, and now he is on the underside of it.
The first act earns its laughs. The film establishes its reversed world with sharp, funny details — “Five Gals” instead of Five Guys, billboards with sexualised male bodies, Harriet Potter on the bookshelf, men wearing “ball bras.” The absurdity works because the satirical point is clear and the mirror being held up is uncomfortably accurate. For about twenty minutes, Ladies First is doing exactly what it set out to do.
Then it runs out of new things to say and decides to repeat the existing things more insistently.
Scene after scene cycles through the same reversals. Men get talked over. Men get objectified. Men get passed over for promotion. Men are called emotional. Each scene is making the same observation — sexism is real, it is embedded everywhere, it feels awful when it happens to you — and the film never moves past that observation into anything deeper or more surprising. Effective satire usually shows you something you had not quite seen before, or sharpens a feeling you vaguely had into something precise and uncomfortable. Ladies First is content to show you things you already know and then show them to you again.
The tonal confusion does not help. The film cannot decide whether it wants to be a breezy fantasy comedy or a pointed critique of institutional misogyny, and it keeps lurching between the two modes without ever blending them. The result feels like a strongly worded email that has been formatted as a knock-knock joke.
Sacha Baron Cohen, who has built an entire career on committed, boundary-pushing comedy, seems oddly uncertain here. Damien needs to be magnetic enough that his behaviour is initially excused, and then vulnerable enough that his humiliation means something. Cohen finds neither register convincingly. He looks like a man performing discomfort rather than feeling it.
Rosamund Pike, on the other hand, is a different story altogether. As Alex Fox — Damien’s overlooked subordinate in the real world and ruthless corporate force in the alternate one — she is effortlessly commanding, coolly funny, and the only person on screen who seems to genuinely understand the film she is in. Every scene she enters improves immediately. She deserves a sharper film built around her, and the fact that she elevates this one is a testament to how good she actually is.
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Fiona Shaw goes entertainingly over the top as a predatory CEO. Richard E. Grant appears briefly as a pigeon-obsessed mentor figure who feels like he escaped from a completely different, possibly better film.
Ladies First is not unwatchable. It is just wasteful — of its premise, its cast, and the genuine anger that should be powering it. The message is not wrong. Sexism is real and deserves to be skewered. But skewering requires precision, and this film swings a blunt instrument repeatedly at the same spot and calls it comedy.
Watch it for Pike. Skip everything else. Ladies First is now streaming on Netflix.