• Ladies First hits Netflix on May 22, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as a sexist exec who wakes up in a female-dominated world
• The film is a remake of Éléonore Pourriat’s 2018 French romcom I Am Not an Easy Man, the first French-language film Netflix ever commissioned
• Critics call the cast — including Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw, Charles Dance, and Richard E. Grant — overqualified for the material
• Director Thea Sharrock says the Cohen-Pike chemistry was obvious from their very first Zoom call together
• Pike says “objectifying” her male costars was genuinely fun to play

There’s a version of Ladies First that could have been a sharp, timely comedy. It has the cast for it. It has the premise. It even has the right director in Thea Sharrock, who brought real warmth and wit to Wicked Little Letters. But somewhere between the concept and the execution, Netflix’s new gender-swap comedy settles for knowing chuckles over genuine laughs — and for a film this stacked with talent, that’s a little frustrating.

The film is a remake of Éléonore Pourriat’s 2018 French romcom I Am Not an Easy Man — notably the first French-language film Netflix ever commissioned — and it follows Damien Sachs (Sacha Baron Cohen), a swaggering, misogynistic advertising executive who is quite literally knocked into a new reality when he runs face-first into a pole chasing down his colleague Alex (Rosamund Pike) after she quits. He wakes up in a world where women hold all the power: his company’s former receptionist Felicity (Fiona Shaw) is now CEO, the janitor Glenda (Kathryn Hunter) owns the whole operation, and Alex is the one being groomed for the top job. His old boss Fred (Charles Dance) sheepishly delivers coffee and gets called “cashmere angel.” At home, his mother watches TV while his father slaves in the kitchen. His dentist sister cracks fart jokes.

You get the idea. The film moves quickly, the gags arrive at a consistent clip, and inevitably some of them land. Female construction workers ogle Damien on the street. He attempts to become “fuckable” for career advancement, submitting to a full body wax in a sequence that plays like a direct callback to The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He orders a plain salad at a business dinner while Shaw and Pike demolish steaks and highballs across the table. When he and Alex finally end up in bed together, they literally wrestle over who gets to be on top. The gender-swapped brand gags — Victor’s Secret, Burger Queen, Harriet Potter, Donna Quixote — come thick and fast, though critics have noted they start to feel belabored pretty quickly. A female-sung cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” lands in the too-on-the-nose category, and Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” opening the film is the kind of soundtrack choice that announces its own joke before the joke has a chance to breathe.

An Almost Ridiculously Overqualified Cast

What saves Ladies First from being a total shrug is the people in it. Cohen, unusually, isn’t hiding behind a disguise or an accent here — Damien is played relatively straight, and he leans into the character’s humiliations with genuine commitment. The film works best when it’s letting him feel things, which is very much by design. Sharrock says she and Cohen were aligned from the start on grounding the comedy in reality rather than playing it broad.

“Sacha was very big on this — the king of comedy that he is — ground it in reality,” Sharrock told How-To Geek. “He particularly has to really feel everything that he’s going through as if it’s really happening, not in a slightly overblown comedic fashion, at which point it loses some of its value. He was a great guide for us on that.”

Pike, meanwhile, is a genuine revelation in the comedy space. Sharrock knew it from the moment the three of them were on a Zoom call together — Pike in Prague, Cohen and Sharrock in London — and Pike started pinning Cohen down on what he thought the most important moment between their characters was. “I could tell from the minute she pinned him down on what was his favorite part in the script… and the way he responded to her questions that I knew this was going to be a winning couple,” Sharrock said.

“She’s amazing. The hidden secret really is she’s absolutely hilarious. She has the best sense of humor. She’s like really quite naughty with her sense of humor, and I think she absolutely loved being in a comedy,” Sharrock added.

Pike herself has talked openly about how much fun she had flipping the script — literally. “I’ve never tried to just absorb all of the misogynistic qualities that we see in men around us all the time. That was fun!” she told Out. “You realize you can do it because you’ve been exposed to it for so many years. Objectifying my costars… I found it very fun.”

Shaw and Hunter are, by multiple accounts, having the absolute time of their lives. Watching Dance — who spent years as the most imperious man in any room on Game of Thrones — meekly hand over a coffee while being called “cashmere angel” is exactly the kind of casting joke that makes a movie like this worth watching even when the script isn’t fully delivering.

Where the Satire Falls Short

The problem isn’t that Ladies First is bad. It’s that it’s comfortable. The script, co-written by Natalie Krinsky (The Broken Hearts Gallery), Cinco Paul, and Katie Silberman (Booksmart), reverses every sexist stereotype it can find with obvious, cheerful efficiency — but doesn’t push past the reversal into anything that actually stings or surprises. The film’s largely female creative team, despite the talent involved, delivers insights about gender that feel more at home in a mid-2000s romcom than a 2026 Netflix release.

The comparison that keeps coming up in reviews is What Women Want, Mel Gibson’s 2000 gender-swap comedy — which is not the kind of cultural touchstone you want your film measured against. Female CEOs are no longer a novelty. The idea of a woman running a company isn’t the radical inversion the film needs it to be, and the script doesn’t seem entirely sure what to do with that reality. Barry Levinson’s Disclosure wrestled with similar workplace power dynamics all the way back in 1994.

There’s also a metatextual angle that’s more interesting than anything the film explicitly does with it: the idea of Cohen’s most famous creation, the cheerfully chauvinistic Borat, being taken apart by Pike’s calculating Gone Girl energy. That’s a movie. Ladies First gestures at it but doesn’t quite commit.

Sharrock directed the whole thing with two versions of every character in mind — each actor essentially giving two separate performances, one for Damien’s “real” world and one for the flipped version. The conversations about hair, costume, posture, and status were communal, she says, because every actor needed to be doing it the same way. “Everybody had to speak to each other,” she explained. That attention to craft shows on screen, even when the material underneath it doesn’t always rise to meet the performances.

Ladies First is streaming on Netflix now. Whether it clicks for you will probably depend on how much you need your satire to have teeth — and how much you’re willing to just enjoy watching Rosamund Pike order a steak and not call anyone back.

The post Ladies First Review: Funny Cast, Familiar Premise appeared first on Cream.

• Ladies First, now streaming on Netflix, stars Sacha Baron Cohen as a sexist exec who wakes up in a world run by women
• The film is a remake of the 2018 French Netflix original I Am Not an Easy Man, directed by Thea Sharrock
• Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw, Kathryn Hunter, Charles Dance, Richard E. Grant, and Emily Mortimer round out the cast
• Critics agree the performances are strong but the satirical premise feels too familiar to land with real punch in 2026
• Director Sharrock says she knew Cohen and Pike would work as a duo from their very first Zoom call

There’s a version of Ladies First that feels urgent and razor-sharp. The cast is there. The director is there. Even the premise — a swaggering male chauvinist gets knocked out cold and wakes up in a world where women hold all the power — has genuine comic potential. What’s missing, unfortunately, is the element of surprise.

Netflix’s new comedy, directed by Thea Sharrock (Wicked Little Letters, Me Before You), is a remake of Éléonore Pourriat’s 2018 French romcom I Am Not an Easy Man — the first French-language film ever commissioned by the streamer. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Damien Sachs, a lothario and advertising executive who, as narrator Richard E. Grant’s Pigeon Man cheerfully informs us upfront, is simply “an asshole.” He struts through the office to the strains of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” treats his brilliant colleague Alex (Rosamund Pike) as little more than a diversity checkbox, and fully expects to be handed the CEO role when his mentor Fred (Charles Dance) retires.

Then he runs face-first into a lamp post chasing Alex down the street, and wakes up somewhere else entirely.

The Flip Side

In Damien’s new reality, the agency’s former receptionist Felicity (Fiona Shaw) is CEO, the cleaning woman Glenda (Kathryn Hunter) owns the entire company, and Alex is on the fast track to the top job. Men are told to relax and not get too emotional in meetings. They order green salads while the women devour steaks. Charles Dance — after seasons of wielding medieval authority on Game of Thrones — sheepishly delivers coffee while Alex calls him her “cashmere angel.” It is, to be fair, a delight.

Shaw and Hunter in particular seem to be having the absolute time of their lives. One of the film’s best scenes has Shaw’s Felicity, draped in a terrycloth robe, summoning Damien to her corporate penthouse for a bit of very pointed quid pro quo. The gender reversal lands hardest in these supporting moments, when the film trusts its ensemble to do the heavy lifting.

The world-building gags come fast — Victor’s Secret, Burger Queen, Harriet Potter, Donna Quixote, a female Pope Beatrice — and while they get a knowing chuckle the first few times, they start to feel like a checklist. A female-sung rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep” plays at one point, and the on-the-nose quality is hard to ignore. The screenplay, credited to Natalie Krinsky (The Broken Hearts Gallery), Cinco Paul, and Katie Silberman (Booksmart), throws every reversed sexist stereotype it can find at the screen with admirable commitment. Some of them stick. A lot of them you’ve already seen coming.

Cohen and Pike Make It Work — Mostly

What keeps Ladies First watchable, even when the plot mechanics are grinding predictably forward, is the chemistry between its two leads. This is a notably different mode for Cohen — no disguise, no alter ego, no accent. Just a man playing a recognizable type of awful person and being asked to feel genuinely humiliated. He leans into it with real commitment, grounding the comedy in something that feels lived-in rather than performed.

And then there’s Pike. Director Sharrock didn’t hesitate when asked about the moment she knew her leads would click. “Our first meeting was, of course, on Zoom,” Sharrock told How-To Geek. “She was in Prague, I think at the time. Sacha and I were both in London. I could tell from the minute she pinned him down on what was his favorite part in the script, what did he think the most important moment was between the two of them, and the way he responded to her questions — I knew this was going to be a winning couple.”

“The hidden secret really is she’s absolutely hilarious,” Sharrock added. “She has the best sense of humor. She’s like really quite naughty with her sense of humor, and I think she absolutely loved being in a comedy.”

Pike is genuinely funny here — assured and sharp in a way that makes you wish the material pushed her further. There’s a metatextual pleasure in watching her, the calculating Amy Dunne of Gone Girl, go to work on Cohen, the man who gave the world the gleefully chauvinistic Borat. But the film keeps Alex a little too polished, a little too regal, even in Damien’s original world. The contrast might have hit harder if she’d been allowed to be more flawed or unglamorous in act one.

A Satire That’s Playing Catch-Up

The deeper issue with Ladies First is timing — not comedic timing, which is mostly fine, but cultural timing. The film’s script was built on the assumption that a female CEO is still a radical, almost unthinkable sight. In 1994, when Barry Levinson’s Disclosure was exploring similar workplace power dynamics, that framing made more sense. In 2026, it lands differently. Female titans of industry exist. They run studios, banks, countries. The satirical inversion the film is banking on doesn’t carry the same jolt it once might have.

A sharper version of this story might have started with a Damien who already knows, intellectually, that his attitudes are wrong — and still can’t shake them. That would be the more interesting, and more honest, version of this particular male journey in 2026. Instead, we get a man who is genuinely shocked to discover that women are capable of running things, and we wait patiently for him to catch up.

Sharrock, for her part, was clear-eyed about the challenge of making comedy land. “It’s the hardest to get right,” she said. “It’s not easy to make lots of people laugh. Everybody’s humor is different. It’s all about timing and delivery, and the minute you’re slightly off, it just doesn’t work.” She also noted that Cohen was insistent on grounding everything in reality. “He particularly has to really feel everything that he’s going through as if it’s really happening, not in a slightly overblown comedic fashion, at which point it loses some of its value. He was a great guide for us on that.”

That approach pays off in the smaller, more human moments. When Damien and Alex end up in bed together and immediately start wrestling over who gets to be on top, it’s genuinely funny precisely because both actors play it completely straight. And when Alex, now his boss, shows zero interest in anything resembling a relationship the morning after, the reversal has actual sting.

The film moves at a clip — it’s 90 minutes and doesn’t waste much of them — and the sheer volume of gags means enough land to keep things pleasant. This is not a bad film. It’s a likable one, carried by an almost ridiculously overqualified British ensemble doing their polished best with material that asks less of them than they’re capable of giving.

By the time Damien has seen the error of his ways — which you’ll clock coming from approximately the second scene — Ladies First has delivered exactly what it promised and nothing more. Sometimes that’s enough. Whether it’s enough for you probably depends on how much you’ve missed a breezy, star-powered battle-of-the-sexes comedy, and how willing you are to forgive a satire for being gentler than the moment it’s wading into.

Ladies First is now streaming on Netflix.

The post Ladies First Review: Great Cast, Dated Concept appeared first on Cream.