"The Tinder Swindler" REVIEW

Did you grow up with the internet?

Have you ever said that you've made some of your closest friends online?

Maybe you've even met your partner through a dating app?

We live in a connected world where social media plays as much a part in our lives as more traditional forms of connection. Especially after a few years of covid, we rely on the internet to prevent total isolation. It's how we read the news, and it's how we consume entertainment, and most importantly it's how we talk to each other.

I mean, you're reading this right now. I'm writing this right now, intending for strangers to read it. That's the internet at work, and it's magical.

However, like any powerful magic, what some people use for good (sharing recipes and writing short stories about love and nightmare demons), other people are going to use for evil.

Do you really know who is on the other end of that dating app?

Enter Simon Leviev, the Tinder Swindler.

I'm going to be extremely careful about spoilers here, because like any good documentary, half the fun of The Tinder Swindler is experiencing the story escalate and unfold in strange directions. Trust me: it will go in weird places. This is a story with twists.

However, if you've read the title and seen the poster for The Tinder Swindler, you've already got some ideas, don't you? You're not dumb. You're reading my review on Vocal, so you must be smart (and you have discerning taste, clearly). So you read the words "Tinder Swindler," and you guess that this is a story about a guy who uses the famous dating app Tinder in order to swindle people. Right?

That much is true. However, the real story is much, much stranger than that. Simon Leviev didn't just use Tinder in order to be a bad boyfriend. He is a gaslighting super-villain who used the internet's capacity to connect us all to each other in order to manipulate people. He's a con-artist of the highest order, and you have to see his crimes to believe them.

On that level The Tinder Swindler works really well as a movie. The plot escalates, the characters are broadly sympathetic, and it continuously rewards your attention. There's a level of audacity on display that makes it difficult to take your eyes off the screen. You need to know what will happen next, and you need to know how all of these characters are going to make it out in the end.

That's not to say that it's without issues, though. The pacing in the first half-hour can be a little bit slow. Like a lot of documentaries, The Tinder Swindler cuts between interviews and dramatisations of the events being described. It uses this a little heavy-handedly, though, which means that often times sequences drag on. An interviewer tells a story, and the documentary cuts to a depiction of exactly what was said. Then the interviewer gives another detail, and the documentary cuts to another dramatisation. This is part of the grammar and structure of the documentary genre, as it allows us to feel like we "saw" events that of course were not actually recorded. However, over-use of it can slow the story down, and in the case of The Tinder Swindler, that's exactly what happens at points.

So if you turn on The Tinder Swindler (and I recommend that you do!), and you find that it's dragging in the first half-hour or so, stick with it. I promise you that you will want to see where it goes from there.

My only other issue with the documentary isn't actually a function of the documentary itself, but rather a detail in the marketing. See that poster up there? The tagline suggests that this is a story about "modern love," and I suppose that's true in a sense.

Tinder is at the heart of this story. There's no avoiding that.

However, the actual con relies very little on Tinder, and I doubt that it would be emphasised so heavily if "tinder swindler" didn't roll off the tongue so nicely. The truth is that this is a story about modern love in the sense that Tinder allowed for a connection, but all of the important events of the story happened off the application. By the film's end, it's very clear that Tinder was just a tool. In a world where Tinder was never invented, the con artist would have used other tools in order to play his cons. By necessity those cons would have been different, but it's not like Tinder made him into a con artist.

I bring this up because Netflix has a history of distributing documentaries that do have a certain degree of social significance. Take Icarus, for example. That 2017, Academy Award winning documentary told the story of some doping in sports, but it had a message that was much broader about the state of professional sports as a whole. You got the sense that this one story was just one fragment of a much larger social problem.

And The Tinder Swindler's marketing, with it's suggestion that "modern love is a dangerous game," seems poised to follow in those footsteps, but it doesn't. This isn't a story about Tinder, ultimately.

It's a story about one man. It's about trust, and it's about relationships, and it's about love, but it always comes back to Simon Leviev.

If there is a take-away from the film, it isn't so much about Tinder as it is about people. Can you ever really trust anyone? Even in an intimate, romantic relationship, do you really know the people you're around? Or is the person sitting next to you a stranger?

What I'm trying to say is that The Tinder Swindler is the perfect movie for Valentine's day.

"The Tinder Swindler" is available via Netflix.