Susannah Grant’s second feature as a director sends a blocked novelist and a younger man from the world of finance on a road trip through Morocco, in a year crowded with stories about older women and younger men.

Lonely Planet is a 2024 American romantic drama written and directed by Susannah Grant and released on Netflix on 11 October 2024. Laura Dern plays Katherine Loewe, a highly successful novelist, and Liam Hemsworth plays Owen Brophy, a much younger man who works in finance. They meet at a writers’ retreat in the Moroccan mountains, where she has come to work and he has come only to accompany his girlfriend. The film runs 96 minutes and was produced for the platform by 3dot Productions.

The premise: a stalled novel and an outsider

Katherine arrives at the retreat to finish her latest book. She is normally prolific, but the writing has stalled since the end of her relationship with a sculptor she lived with for fourteen years, who has asked her to move out of his farmhouse. What she wants from Morocco is a quiet room and enough distance to work.

Owen is there for a different reason. He has come as the boyfriend of Lily Kemp, played by Diana Silvers, a young novelist whose debut has been a critical and commercial success. Lily enjoys the company and the attention of the other writers, especially Rafih Abdo, a fan of her work played by Younès Boucif. Owen, meanwhile, struggles to fit in among the literary guests and spends much of his time on high-pressure phone calls about a real-estate deal back in the United States.

The two leads first cross paths by accident. When the taps in her room stop working, Katherine gets lost looking for drinking water, and Owen walks her back. The next day, while Lily and the others stay behind to talk to a reporter, Katherine and Owen go on a pre-planned excursion to a local town. Their taxi breaks down on the way back, and a local family takes them in for a home-cooked dinner.

From there the story follows the route the genre promises: the gap between Owen and Lily widens, the age difference between him and Katherine becomes something the characters have to talk about, and the film leaves the retreat for the road and the coast. How it ends is not spoiled here.

Susannah Grant’s second film as director

Susannah Grant, born in New York in 1963, studied at Amherst College and the AFI Conservatory and won a Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting. She learned the trade in television as a producer and one of the main writers of Party of Five between 1994 and 1997, while building a career as a screenwriter for studio features: Pocahontas (1995), Ever After (1998), 28 Days (2000) and Erin Brockovich (2000), which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

She followed it with the adaptations In Her Shoes (2005) and Charlotte’s Web (2006), and in 2006 she directed her own script for the first time with Catch and Release, starring Jennifer Garner and Timothy Olyphant. Further screenplays included The Soloist (2009) and The 5th Wave (2016). On television she created the CBS medical drama A Gifted Man (2011) and, in 2019, co-created, wrote and directed the Netflix limited series Unbelievable, with Toni Collette, Merritt Wever and Kaitlyn Dever, which won a Peabody Award.

Lonely Planet is therefore only her second feature as a director, eighteen years after Catch and Release, and a return to Netflix after Unbelievable. In a director’s statement published by Netflix, Grant described the project as an attempt to make a film about “the transformational power of travel”, and about how putting thousands of miles between yourself and your routine can make you see your own life in a different light. In the same statement she framed the story around a chance encounter that throws the two leads together in a dusty car on a bumpy road trip through the North African hinterland.

From a 2022 announcement to a shoot in Morocco

Netflix announced the project in April 2022, describing it only as a love story set in Morocco and keeping the plot under wraps. Grant was producing alongside Sarah Timberman, her producing partner on Unbelievable, and Liza Chasin for 3dot Productions, with Kira Goldberg as the creative lead for Netflix. Brendan Ferguson, Corinne Weber and Margaret Chernin served as executive producers.

3dot is the company Liza Chasin launched in 2018 after 26 years at Working Title Films, where she had joined in 1991 and served as president from 1996. It signed a multi-year first-look film deal with Netflix in 2019, and before Lonely Planet it had produced the thriller series Anatomy of a Scandal for the platform.

The supporting cast was announced in May 2022, with the film already in production. Diana Silvers was known for playing Erin Naird in the Netflix comedy Space Force and for Booksmart, while Younès Boucif, a French actor, had appeared in the Netflix series Standing Up and the feature Magnetic Beats. The ensemble also includes Adriano Giannini, the Roman actor and son of Giancarlo Giannini, as Ugo Jaconelli, and Rachida Brakni, a former member of the Comédie-Française and winner of the César Award for Most Promising Actress, as Fatema Benzakour.

According to the Moroccan outlet Yabiladi, filming took place in Marrakesh and in Santa Clarita, California. During the shoot, Moroccan press also photographed Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth on a break in Chefchaouen, the blue-washed town in the north of the country.

The crew behind the camera

Grant surrounded herself with seasoned technicians. The cinematographer is Ben Smithard, the British director of photography of The Damned United, My Week with Marilyn, Goodbye Christopher Robin and the Downton Abbey film, who won an Emmy for Return to Cranford. The editor is Kevin Tent, who has cut every feature directed by Alexander Payne, from Election and Sideways to The Descendants and The Holdovers, the last two bringing him Academy Award nominations. The score is by Pinar Toprak, the Istanbul-born composer who became the first woman to score a major superhero film with Captain Marvel and whose credits also include The Lost City.

Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth, almost 23 years apart

Laura Dern, born in Los Angeles in 1967 to the actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, came to prominence in the 1980s with Mask and David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet, followed by Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Jurassic Park made her internationally famous in 1993, Big Little Lies brought her a new television audience, and in 2020 she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Lonely Planet was announced in the same season as her return as Ellie Sattler in Jurassic World Dominion (2022).

Liam Hemsworth, born in 1990 in Australia, started out in the soap Neighbours before moving to American films with The Last Song (2010) and the role of Gale Hawthorne in all four Hunger Games films. He had already tried the romantic comedy from the inside with the genre spoof Isn’t It Romantic (2019), and his other recent credits include Poker Face (2022) and Land of Bad (2024). Six months after the Lonely Planet announcement, in October 2022, he was cast as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher from its fourth season, replacing Henry Cavill.

Both leads talked about the project in Netflix’s own launch material. Dern said that Katherine “is at a turning point in her life where she is looking for a softening and deeper understanding, and she finds it in a love story”. Hemsworth called sharing scenes with Dern “an absolute privilege”. With Dern born in February 1967 and Hemsworth in January 1990, almost 23 years separate the two actors, and the age difference is part of the premise rather than something the film tries to hide.

A crowded May–December year

The film arrived in the middle of a wave. When Netflix set the release date in August 2024, the trade press placed Lonely Planet alongside Todd Haynes’s May December, which Netflix had released in 2023 after its Cannes premiere, and Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, with Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, which premiered in Venice and opened in cinemas on Christmas Day 2024. Earlier in 2024, The Idea of You, with Anne Hathaway, had reached Prime Video, and Netflix had released A Family Affair, with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron.

The romance abroad is older still. William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953) set the template of two people from different worlds thrown together in a foreign country for a short, intense stretch of time, and the formula has been revisited ever since. Lonely Planet, which shares its name with the travel-guide series, adds the writers’ retreat and the publishing world to that structure, and makes the woman the older and more established of the pair.

How it landed on Netflix

The audience found it quickly. According to Netflix’s own Top 10 data, Lonely Planet drew 11 million views in its first three days on the platform, enough for third place among English-language films in the week of its release. The following week, 14 to 20 October 2024, it climbed to number one with 13.7 million views, and it stayed in the Top 10 for four weeks in total, adding up to about 33.4 million views. Its reception elsewhere was mixed.

Where Lonely Planet sits two years on

Two years after its release, Lonely Planet reads as a modest entry in two careers that have moved on: Liam Hemsworth has since taken over one of Netflix’s flagship fantasy roles, and Laura Dern has gone on to reunite with Noah Baumbach on Jay Kelly (2025), also for Netflix, and to star in Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (2025). For Susannah Grant it remains the rare original screenplay she has also directed, built on one of the most familiar structures in romantic cinema. The Top 10 figures suggest that the audience for grown-up romance in a faraway place has not gone anywhere, whatever the film adds to the formula.

Tags: Netflix, romance, Laura Dern