Lily James’ new movie Swiped tells the inspirational true story of Whitney Wolfe Herd, the successful entrepreneur who went from being a co-founder of the dating site Tinder to creating her own inclusive, female-forward business: Bumble. While reviews of Swiped have been mixed, the film generally does a good job of staying loyal to the true story.

When it comes to movies based on real people, it’s important to strike an effective balance between relaying the facts of the story as they happened, and keeping things entertaining for the viewer. Swiped mostly succeeds in this regard, sticking true to Whitney Wolfe Herd’s personal experience while embellishing some events with new characters and subplots.

Swiped Sticks To The Facts Of Bumble’s Foundation

Although Whitney Wolfe Herd is most famous for her work on the dating site Bumble, Swiped largely details the years leading up to her entrepreneurship, focusing on her time working for Tinder. This is all based on true events; Herd was initially hired by Sean Rad to work as the head of marketing at Tinder, ultimately being named a co-founder.

Throughout her years at Tinder, Wolfe Herd was subject to a huge amount of Sєxism, misogyny, and prejudice for being the only female executive in the company. This ultimately forced her to resign after tensions between her, Rad, and another co-founder named Justin Mateen became too heavy to bear.

Swiped is expressly interested in this conflict between wanting to make a change in the tech industry and having to suffer the prejudices of being a woman in a male-dominated space, and the film takes some creative liberties to really make this commentary stand out. These include a handful of original characters, who serve to emphasize this gender-based divide.

Creative Liberties Taken With Whitney Wolfe Herd’s Story

Wolfe Herd filed a lawsuit against Tinder after her resignation, citing “threatening and abusive” behavior as the main reason for her departure. Swiped never hesitates to show this in full, leaning into the toxic relationship between Wolfe Herd and Mateen as a microcosm for the company’s “alpha male” culture as a whole.

While Swiped may not be Lily James’ best movie, the actress does a brilliant job of conveying Wolfe Herd’s disgust and paranoia over this toxic workspace, which ultimately motivated the entrepreneur to cultivate her own healthy, inclusive dating site through Bumble.

The film breezes over the details of Bumble’s early years, focusing instead on what pushed Wolfe Herd to make this giant leap — including her lawsuit against Tinder, her out-of-court settlement and NDA, and the resulting scandal with Badoo’s founder and CEO, Andrey Andreev. Swiped takes a very factual approach towards this story, presenting everything objectively.

But while Swiped‘s portrayal of the business facts is very authentic, the film doesn’t always offer the same loyalty to Wolfe Herd’s personal life. Certain details about the entrepreneur’s relationships and family are changed, including how she met her long-time husband, Michael Herd. In Swiped, the pair catch each other’s eyes at a bar.

But in real life, Whitney and Michael were introduced by a mutual friend during a ski vacation. This may be trivial, but it serves a clear purpose in the story: her initial attraction to Michael at the bar is what spurs Wolfe Herd to come up with the idea of Bumble’s key feature of women always making the first moves.

This may not have been the way things actually went down in real life, but it’s a simple storytelling device that makes the plot run along more smoothly and doesn’t change too much about the overall story. Characters like Myha’la’s Tisha serves a similar purpose. The fictional character solely exists to give Wolfe Herd a key female ally at Tinder.

This is a technique employed by plenty of great biopics – the details of certain interactions are often much less important than the purpose they serve in the story. But in Swiped, there may be a more specific reason for the level of ambiguity that surrounds Wolfe Herd’s personal life during the Tinder years.

Whitney Wolfe Herd Still Cannot Legally Speak About Her Tinder Settlement

As part of her out-of-court settlement with Tinder, Whitney Wolfe Herd was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement that prevented her from speaking publicly about the entire process. This agreement is still in place, and the closing credits of Swiped are very clear that Wolfe Herd was not involved with the making of the film.

This is a crucial detail, because it means that Swiped can only speculate about certain aspects of Wolfe Herd’s life — such as her relationship with Mateen, her marriage to Michael Herd, and her personal experiences founding Bumble. The credits even express that “some of the characters, relationships, [and] incidents have been fictionalized for purposes of dramatization.”

As such, Swiped comes across as a very objective and informative recounting of Tinder and Bumble’s formation as businesses, but a much less reliable account of Whitney Wolfe Herd’s personal life during these years. The film even makes use of Wolfe Herd’s real-life NDA, using the gaps in the story to develop the themes of female silence and male toxicity.