After spending years playing men who bulldoze through rooms with entitlement and bad instincts, Sacha Baron Cohen now gets dropped into a world where none of that currency works anymore. That is the setup for “Ladies First,” Netflix’s new comedy from director Thea Sharrock, which pairs Baron Cohen with Rosamund Pike in a parallel-world satire about gender, power, and the panic that sets in when the old hierarchy suddenly collapses.
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Baron Cohen stars as Damien Sachs, a high-powered advertising executive who appears to have everything—money, status, and a steady stream of casual flings—as he prepares to become CEO of a major agency. Then the floor gives way. Damien wakes up in a parallel world dominated by women, where the rules have changed, the boardroom no longer belongs to him, and the person across from him is no longer someone he can easily outmaneuver. Pike plays Alex Fox, now his fiercest rival, in a workplace comedy that sets the two on a collision course, with the film built around reversed power dynamics.
That premise gives “Ladies First” a clear commercial hook. Still, it also sounds like the kind of broad studio-style satire Netflix has not leaned into enough lately: star-driven, high-concept, and built around two performers who know exactly how to weaponize control, hauteur, and humiliation. Sharrock, whose recent directing credits include “Wicked Little Letters” and “The Beautiful Game,” is steering the film, and the supporting cast adds even more weight with Charles Dance, Emily Mortimer, Tom Davis, Richard E. Grant, and Fiona Shaw rounding out the ensemble.
Netflix is launching the film globally on May 22, and the pitch is already clean enough to do the work on its own: one man’s nightmare, one woman’s opening, and a comedy built around what happens when the script gets flipped.
