If you’re looking for a good comedy and a bit of reflection underneath all the laughs, Ladies First is a sharp, funny, and quietly thought-provoking film that tastefully uses the premise of a reversed world to expose just how deeply sexism is woven into the fabric of everyday life — with a lightness that makes it no less effective. Here is our review.
The story follows Damien Sachs, played by Sacha Baron Cohen — a man who seemingly has it all: money, power, and a never-ending stream of casual flings, on the verge of ascending to CEO at a leading advertising agency. His life seems perfect. Until he wakes up in a parallel world dominated by women, where the roles are completely reversed and he, for the first time, finds himself on the wrong side of the hierarchy. Waiting for him is Alex Fox, played by Rosamund Pike: confident, determined, everything Damien is used to being — but in a world where he counts for almost nothing. To get his life back he’ll have to climb the ranks of the agency again, this time from the bottom. And to do that, he’ll have to live through the experiences and challenges women face every day.
A reversed world — and an uncomfortably familiar one
The film is set in the advertising world — a field that doesn’t merely reflect gender stereotypes, but has actively created and keeps perpetuating them. It’s a precise choice of setting, not a casual one. And within that context, Ladies First builds its satire with a certain intelligence: it doesn’t aim at overt misogyny, the kind that’s easy to condemn, but at something more slippery — the polite façade, the gentle paternalism, the sexism that has learned to disguise itself as consideration. Damien’s line — “you women have it easy” — is not an isolated gaffe: it’s the heart of the film, the way resentment toward change gets repackaged as a legitimate grievance rather than examined as a symptom.
The scene that says it all
The most effective scene is the one where Damien is invited to the home of Felicity Chase — played by Fiona Shaw — the agency’s CEO, who in the real world was merely the receptionist. We watch him light up at what is clearly a classic proposal with a power dynamic attached to it: a dinner invitation with sexual innuendos. And it’s in that moment that the film does its best work — because we realise just how ordinary that situation is for women, how often they find themselves navigating it and normalising it, because that is simply the rule of the game. Watching it play out for Damien, with the same naturalness with which he would have treated one of his own employees, is the kind of mirror that makes you laugh and sting a little at the same time.
Does power only come in one shape?
Where the film raises its most interesting questions is in the way it constructs its reversed world: women in power box in the living room, behave in deliberately crude ways, have casual sex. It’s a comic short-circuit, but also something more uncomfortable. Because in order to be equal, the women in the story adopt behaviours coded as male — as if power only had one available model. As if femininity and authority were still, in 2026, difficult to hold together without one of them giving way.
Is it worth watching?
Ladies First is a light film — it doesn’t deny it, it doesn’t try to be anything else. But light doesn’t mean shallow. The comedy works precisely because the reversed world seems so absurd and unthinkable to us — and yet the exact same dynamics, applied to women in real life, are considered completely normal. It’s a good thought and well expressed. The only thing I’d tweak is the ending — “perhaps it’s not so blown up at all” is a little informal and vague.
While some aspects of the ‘real’ world of the film have been called out for pushing believability — nowadays men’s behavior isn’t as awful as depicted, there are women in power to a certain extent, and they don’t exactly behave the way they do in the reversed matriarchal world — that stretch is precisely where the comedy comes in. Yet, the more you think about it, the less exaggerated it actually seems. And this is where the irony stings with that bitterness of truth.
The fact that many male reviews have reacted with irritation, accusing the film of being feminist propaganda, says more than the critics probably intended. And it is, probably, the best confirmation that a film like this still needed to exist in all the absurdity and satire that hides.
Review by Leila Magnolia
