Girls to Buy (2021)

Girls to Buy is a sleek, propulsive true-crime thriller that lures you in with champagne-gloss luxury and then steadily tightens into something colder and more unsettling, the way a good cautionary tale should. Maria Sadowska shoots the world of VIP access and curated glamour with seductive confidence, while Paulina Gałązka gives Emi a hungry intelligence that makes her rise feel thrilling even as the ground under it starts to shift. Beneath the glitz, the film has teeth—less interested in cheap titillation than in how ambition gets weaponized, and how an industry that sells fantasy can practice hypocrisy in plain sight. Fair warning: it’s sexually explicit and not shy about vice, so it won’t be for everyone, but if you can handle the intensity, it’s an efficiently made, sharply performed ride with a lingering sting.

Girls to Buy is clearly aiming to be a glossy, hard-edged cautionary tale about ambition, exploitation, and the ugly machinery behind a “luxury” scandal, and it does have moments where the social critique lands. The problem is it’s nearly 140 minutes and you feel it: the early rise-and-reveal hook gives way to a second half that drags, piles on incidents, and starts to feel chaotic rather than escalating with purpose. It’s also very explicit, with frequent sex and nudity plus heavy drugs and alcohol, so if you’re hoping for a more restrained thriller, this will likely feel more like shock-value drama than suspense. If you can tolerate the excess and want a sensational, tabloid-to-screen crime story with a committed lead performance and a slick surface, you’ll get something out of it; if you need tight pacing and clear narrative focus, you’ll probably resent the time investment.