A novelist struggling with her latest manuscript and a handsome younger financier with a bestselling-author girlfriend strike up a romance after meeting at a writers’ retreat in Morocco.

Early in their acquaintanceship, Owen (Liam Hemsworth) confesses to Katherine (Laura Dern) that he doesn’t really care for travel. “People always say it’s going to be this transformative experience. Go to a new, exotic place, meet the new, exotic you,” he says. “But you get there and you’re not new or exotic. You’re just you.”

Actually, that’s not entirely fair. There is one thing writer-director Susannah Grant (an Oscar nominee for Erin Brockovich) does very persuasively, and that’s pitch Morocco as a vacation destination. From the moment Katherine pulls up to her writers’ retreat, we’re guided through one postcard-ready tableau after another: luxury rooms furnished in elaborately patterned silks, majestic ruins steeped in centuries of history, pretty streets lined with watercolor-blue walls. The views from the kasbah, nestled deep in the hills outside Marrakech, are uniformly spectacular. As fellow attendee Lily (Diana Silvers) gasps to Owen, the finance-bro boyfriend she’s brought along for the ride: “You can see forever.”

Though Katherine has come in a desperate attempt to finish her novel, she’s forced out of her room when she discovers the faucet isn’t working and she has no water. Though Owen’s just there to support Lily, spotty cell service forces him outside as well. The pair seem mutually intrigued from the moment their eyes meet; they strike up a fast friendship that inevitably blossoms into something more.

Ostensibly, Katherine and Owen are drawn together by the instant and ineffable ease they feel with one another. Really, though, what seems to unite them is the fact that they’re otherwise surrounded by assholes, Lily included.

Lonely Planet’s depiction of elite authors could count as scathing satire if the film had a sharper knack for detail, or any sense of humor. When these scribes aren’t falling all over themselves to flatter one another, they’re openly sneering at Owen for failing to remember the name of a character from Great Expectations. Only Katherine treats him with basic courtesy, let alone genuine interest in his thoughts, his feelings, his high school memories, his current work problems. (Though in fairness, even he doesn’t seem all that interested in his own private equity job.)

Together, they come across like two nice enough people having a nice enough time, but hardly a deep or passionate one. Even their climactic love scenes are less than stimulating, given that both leads are buried in so much shadow and choppy editing I found myself wondering how much of them were being performed by body doubles. Then again, closeups aren’t really the film’s strong suit either. Whether due to a trick of lighting, makeup or actual VFX work, there are moments when the actors look so airbrushed as to seem not quite real.

But such halfheartedness seems part and parcel with the rest of the film, which makes almost no effort to imagine Owen and Katherine’s worlds outside their connection. Though there are one or two scenes set after the trip, we spend no time in the characters’ real homes or with their non-vacation friends. (Indeed, I’m not sure we ever actually learn what cities they live in.) Heck, despite the fact that Katherine’s writer’s block is the catalyst for this entire adventure, we don’t even get to learn what kind of books she writes — just that they’re critically acclaimed and commercially successful.

In broad strokes, Lonely Planet fits right in with this year’s mini-trend of older woman-younger boyfriend romances, alongside The Idea of You, A Family Affair and the upcoming Babygirl. And though it never directly addresses the age gap, it does technically deliver on the dream of meeting a hot young thing who gets you intellectually, emotionally and sexually in a way no one else ever has.