Swipe 2019

The film features performances by Ebony Obsidian and Jefferson White.

James is an introverted freshman who shares a dorm with Lance, a wealthy student who excels with women and prefers casual hookups. In a classroom where James is clearly the strongest student in a basic programming course, Lance initially pitches a light workload so no one else in the class has to work. But Lance soon shifts gears when he wants to build something bigger: a campus-wide app for hookups. He discovers that James has been coding since childhood, and he recruits him to create the ultimate hookup platform, a bold project that promises to pay for James’s transfer to an Ivy League school.

James takes over their dorm room, pouring long hours into the project—an app named Jungle that aims to connect people physically with no commitment or strings attached. The design philosophy is stark: no numbers or names are exchanged, and the result is guaranteed one-night encounters. The lure of the Ivy League payoff is strong, and James weighs the opportunity against the growing tension of the work he’s doing.

To shield himself from blame, James asks Lance to claim Jungle as his own. Meanwhile, a professor in their computer science class quietly excuses James from the usual workload, suggesting he’s constantly coding and therefore should be allowed to focus on Jungle. The dynamic shifts from collaboration to concealment, with James navigating the moral traps that come with creating a system built on fleeting connections.

When Christmas break arrives, the consequences of Jungle begin to surface in intimate, personal ways. James’s father brings a very young date—someone he found through Jungle—into the holiday home, while his mother, influenced by friends, starts to explore the app herself. James watches, torn between pride and concern, as his family’s traditional holiday rhythms collide with the anonymous world he helped create.

Seeking to understand the broader impact of his invention, James initiates a personal audit of past sexual and relationship experience, asking his grandparents and their friends to answer a questionnaire about what they’ve known and how they’ve connected in their own lives. The results—stirring and uncomfortable—underscore the real-world echoes of a digital scheme that treated human connections as transactions. When he discovers his mom has returned to Jungle, James swift acts to take down Jungle and other similar apps to halt the spread of this unbridled approach, at least for the moment.

Lance and his cohort soon catch wind of James’s intervention and press him to reignite the project, intensifying the pressure on him as a coder and as a person torn between loyalty and accountability. Back at campus, James hides from the scheming group in Hannah’s sorority house, where he’s told he can stay only if he builds a relationship-focused app for the sisters. He briefly returns to his dorm room, only to be intercepted by Lance and his crew, who coerce him to stay and get their app running again. A clever ruse involving a relaxing tea allows James to slip away and shelter once more among the sorority sisters.

The danger escalates when Lance leaks James’s involvement to the press, turning up the heat and forcing Hannah to confront the unfolding reality. James confesses that his aim in part was to connect with her, but Hannah reveals she never downloaded Jungle, and therefore the app failed to deliver what he hoped. This confession marks a turning point as James urges everyone to step away from the apps and seek true, real-world connections. In a final, hopeful moment, James admits his feelings for Hannah, and the two share a kiss, signaling a possible path forward beyond the tangled web of code and consequences.