Tinder’s been around for nearly five years now, but pop culture is still catching up to the fact that this is the new standard for dating. We’ve seen the montages on shows like Insecure, Master of None, or Broad City, where our lead lines up a series of depressing app dates. As of last year a Tinder-themed rom-com was in the works and now we’re getting a truly dramatic romance from Drake Doremus, the director of Like Crazy, about the perils of dating apps.
Newness stars Laia Costa and Nicholas Hoult as two extremely hot people who crave “constant newness” and plow through what seems like other extremely hot partners through an app called Winx. The two fall for each other, even deleting their Winx apps in the process, but it seems like they can’t quite stay monogamous, or non-monogamous, without a few screaming matches. Ah, young love!
If this looks and sounds like a movie written by people who don’t use dating apps, you’d be right. The screenplay was inspired by Nancy Jo Sales’ hyperbolic 2015 Vanity Fair Tinder article, which paints a picture of a “dating apocalypse” among twenty-somethings.
“The article was fascinating to us because [screenwriter Ben York Jones] is in a long-term relationship, and I just ended one a little bit ago, so we just kind of missed that whole thing,” Doremus told Movie Mezzanine. “It was interesting for us to look at that and say, ‘What’s really going on now? What’s happening, how is it evolving, how is it affecting our ability to have a strong connection with somebody?’”