What Is This Time-Travelling Friendzone Garbage?

Are you tired of the very idea of the “friend zone?” Would you love it if the entire concept were sailed out to sea, a rickety raft floating in an ocean of red pill tears? Essentially the belief that a woman is doing a disservice to her male friends by not choosing to indulge their romantic and/or sexual desires, the “friend zone” is dehumanizing, entitled garbage. So why is Netflix making a rom-com about the concept?

When We First Met is the story of two friends, except not really because it’s not friendship if you have no interest in a non-romantic relationship with the other person and are only sticking around in the hopes of changing their mind.

Anyway, “friends” Noah and Avery (Adam Devine and Alexandra Daddario) meet at a Halloween party in 2014. They spend the night hanging out, but at the end of the evening, he goes in for a kiss and she gives him a hug, which he takes as having “waited too long” and now he’s “relegated to the friend zone.

Quick note here, if you “miss your chance” in a matter of hours, you never really had much of a chance in the first place. She just wants to be your friend, period.

But then Noah gets the ability to travel back in time via an old photobooth and tries to change the events of night they met in a way that would lead to them ending up together. It’s like Groundhog Day but way less interesting. Shockingly, his repeated attempts to stalk and neg her into love don’t work out.

I’m sure this movie will end with Noah learning some lessons about friendship and whatnot—the alternative is that he actually does manipulate her into loving him and I don’t know if even this trailer looks like it belongs to that bad of a movie–but the entire premise just drips with ickiness from the start.

(image: YouTube)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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