Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love, Sex & 30 Candles’ on Netflix Review, A South African Film About The Bonds Between Four Girlfriends Turning 30

30 is certainly a milestone age, and in the new Netflix movie Love, Sex & 30 Candles, it’s the thing that a group of four girlfriends have been looking forward to since they first met in college. But now that the year of 30 is upon them all, they’ve started to reflect on how they haven’t achieved the dreams they had for themselves in their younger days, from high-powered jobs to husbands and kids. Through all of their setbacks though, they have each other… until one of them gets pregnant by the other’s boyfriend and throws the group dynamic into chaos.

LOVE, SEX & 30 CANDLES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman sits on a toilet staring at a positive pregnancy test. She takes a deep breath to process the information.

The Gist: Love, Sex & 30 Candles, which is based on the book The 30th Candle by Angela Makholwa, is the story of four women: Linda (Candice Modiselle), a commitmentphobe who just dumped her fiancé and is caring for her sick mother, Sade (Gabisile Tshabalala), who is engaged to a controlling man named Winston she met at her church which her friends refer to as a cult, Dikeledi (Amogelang Chidi), who shares a daughter with a guy named Tebogo who’s kind of a deadbeat dad, and Nolwazi (Bahumi Madisakwane), who is celebrating her 30th birthday and learning she’s pregnant – she’s the woman on the toilet in the first shot – all in the same day.

The women are best friends from college, and as they gather to celebrate Nolwazi’s 30th, she tearfully tells them the news that she’s pregnant. This wasn’t in her plan, but even worse, the man who got her pregnant is Dikeledi’s on-again off-again boyfriend Tebogo (Lunga Shabalala) after they spent a drunken night together, a fact she plans to keep secret. Tebogo insists that Nolwazi get an abortion but she refuses. In the midst of all of his drama with Nowlazi, Tebogo proposes to Dikeledi, who simultaneously wants her family unit to be official, but she also doesn’t trust him. She’s spent ten years disappointed by this man, and she’s finally ready to move on and maybe even date someone new, but she feels forced into the proposal for the sake of her young daughter.

Eventually, Sade and Linda learn that Tebogo is the father of Nowlazi’s baby, and when Dikeledi finds out they were keeping the secret from her, she cuts them all off. As the women spend time apart, things get more complicated for everyone: Linda’s ailing mother dies, while Sade’s husband becomes physically abusive and instructs her to quit her job and cut ties with her friends so she can dedicate herself to serving him. And Nowlazi, a fashion designer, finally gets the chance of a lifetime to be featured at Fashion Week. Realizing the mistakes she’s made an the friendships she’s jeopardized, she creates a line called “Kedi” which is Dikeledi’s nickname, but before she can even celebrate her success, she collapses onstage and is rushed to the hospital with eclampsia and forced into surgery to remove the baby.

The women come together in the final moments of the film, where they finally embrace the fact that they’re always there for each other, but jeez, what a road it takes to get there.

What Will It Remind You Of? While one could make a comparison to Sex and the City or Girlfriends, with the four 30-ish women dealing with their complicated relationships in a city, the movie has a very melodramatic, unrealistic, Lifetime movie quality to it when it comes to how overly archetypal and predictably the characters are drawn.

Our Take: Every woman in this friendship quartet is going through some serious drama as they hit the ripe old age of 30 over the course of the film – to each of them, 30 is a signifier of adulthood, a peak of having one’s life figured out. Alas, none of them have anything figured out. Despite the fact that Nowlazi’s career is on the rise, her pregnancy (and the fallout around the baby’s father) has turned her life upside down. Sade is marrying a terrible man, but it’s the only way to placate her religious parents and guarantee herself a walk down the aisle. Linda can’t commit to a man, but that’s also because her own father abandoned her, and her mother’s sickness is bringing her parents’ complex relationship to light. And Dikeledi is trying to move past Tebogo, and even date a new professor from her university job, but finding out he got Nowlazi pregnant is a slap in the face. For each character to have SO MUCH GOING ON, it’s a lot, there’s very little stability within the film and zero humor, which it really needs.

Thee point the movie is trying to make is that no one has anything figured out at 30, and the filmmakers hit us over the head with that at every turn with no subtlety. The final scenes, as each woman’s situation resolves, do offer some satisfaction: Sade, having decided to leave her husband who refuses to have sex with her after learning she wasn’t a virgin when they married, finds him in bed with the preacher’s wife (and snaps a photo of it for proof), while Nowlazi and Dikeledi patch things up after the baby is born. It’s a little too neat, but after sitting through so many bad things happening, the happy ending a sweet relief.

Sex and Skin: True to its name, the movie shows each of the women engaged in plenty of intimate activity.

Parting Shot: The film ends as it began, with a birthday party, but this one is for Linda. As the friends toast with their champagne glasses, she declares, “Happy birthday to me!”

Most Pilot-y Line: “I have the best girlfriends anyone could ask for,” Nowlazi says at one point.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Love, Sex & 30 Candles feels like it should be a romantic comedy where our four leads find happiness and/or love (in addition to finding themselves!) but instead, it’s an overwrought drama about four women going through some really crummy situations in their lives, only to finally overcome all the dourness in the final 5 minutes of the film.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.