Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth's Netflix romance

In a year when younger men are wooing older women in steamy romances like “The Idea of ​​You” and “Babygirl,” it's truly refreshing that writer-director Susannah Grant's “Lonely Planet” doesn't try to capture the issues which occur when an older woman falls in love with a man almost half her age. Rather, she is more concerned with exploring the delicate entanglements of life that caused these individuals to intersect in the first place. While many of the picture's finer details desperately need ironing out, the wrinkles in these two characters' lives are compelling enough.

World-famous writer Katherine (Laura Dern) is stuck. She was recently separated from her ex-sculptor and thrown out of the house. She suffers from severe writer's block while trying to write her next bestseller. She traveled thousands of miles to Marrakech to attend an exclusive international writers' retreat to recover from her frustrations and focus on her editor's deadlines. But when they arrive, the journey turns out to be problematic. Her luggage is lost on the airlines, she learns that her sleazy ex-boyfriend Ugo (Adriano Giannini) is also there, and the plumbing in her luxurious room isn't working. She doesn't seem to be taking a break. That is, until she does.

Enter Owen (Liam Hemsworth), who is in his mid-thirties. Believing he has his life under control, he takes on a high-risk job in private equity and plays the dutiful boyfriend of invited author Lily (Diana Silvers), an overnight sensation driven by increasing pressure to write her follow-up books. is stressed. But fate sends Owen and Katherine on trips to nearby Moroccan marketplaces together while the other retreatants work and sightsee. The two form a flirtatious friendship and discuss meaningful topics such as travel, careers, and the human condition. But at the same time, the façade of the seemingly perfect relationship between Owen and Lily begins to falter when their daily conversations quickly escalate into arguments. It becomes increasingly clear that Owen and Katherine's paths collide in a torrid love affair.

When it comes to her main characters, Grant has a keen sense of subtext and nuance, particularly when dealing with the more delicate aspects that lead to Owen and Katherine's inevitable torrid affair. She explores the intricacies of the younger couple's arguments and arguments, signaling that their relationship is more in shambles than the actual ruins they visit during a day trip. No one is the stereotypical villain in Owen and Lily's breakup, per se, although her arrogance, her conniving hypocrisy, and her careless emotional infidelity to fellow writer Rafih (Younès Boucif) are on display far more often than his workaholic distractions. Silvers carefully avoids undertones in the dialogue that make Lily sound stupid rather than sensible, particularly when echoing some of the material's heartbreaking tones.

The way the characters are drawn is the story's most appealing feature: unlike other films of this type, Katherine is neither outwardly sexually frustrated nor is she a victim of her current circumstances. She doesn't make any advances towards Owen either, although there are small sparks when they're together. This couple and their relationship feel real and complex – they both go through life confusing their survival mode with happiness, but when the opportunity for true love arises, they learn through self-acceptance that they can be a better version of themselves together. Dern and Hemsworth are on top form in portraying all of this, bringing a lively playfulness to the cheesier, genre-defined tropes (like “meet-cute” and “3rd”)^approx conflict of actions).

In her follow-up to 2006's Catch and Release, Grant makes a few rookie mistakes. Right from the start there are minor infractions, such as the pervasive use of distractingly bad visual effects and day-for-night sequences. Considering that Katherine's trigger for leaving her room and working in a closet is the lack of working plumbing, we wonder how often she sports freshly washed hair without using a shower. It's hard to believe that she would look so fresh just based on her evening swim in the pool. Supporting characters outside of the main trio are hardly one-dimensional and their inclusion in lip service adds no tension to the proceedings. Ugo and the irascible elderly Nobel laureate Ada (Shosha Goren) are given brief camera time (the latter plays in one of the film's fleeting funny jokes), but they too suffer from a startling lack of development.

Grant keeps the film's tone more in line with Under The Tuscan Sun than Netflix's usual trinket-laden romantic fare. Still, the narrative's overarching sense that people sometimes have to get lost in order to find themselves feels like a generic platitude emblazoned on the interior rather than a resounding revelation. There's a hollowness that seems to hide the aesthetic, from the travelogue shots of the lavish property and its beautiful desert surroundings to the warm smiles on the locals' faces as they feed and clothe weary explorers. Although the characters stand out and their situations are intriguing, it feels like an algorithm has crept in to make the whole thing more boring than the ingredients.