Tinder. Farmers Only. Hinge. Christian Mingle. Letterboxd?
As someone whose deal-breaker is not caring about film, I’ve started considering Letterboxd—an app dedicated to reviewing movies—a viable matchmaking landscape. I follow some close friends, stealing their logged movies and stowing them away in my watchlist, but most of the profiles I follow belong to complete strangers.
User HorrorSage exclusively logs obscure horror flicks that often sit way below the 3/5 star rating. User Kevflix And Chill reviews lots of modern blockbusters with the occasional throwback. Their whole shtick is announcing the “Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” or how many degrees of separation away from Kevin Bacon every movie they watch is. A third user, Brandon, doesn’t have any preferences that give their profile a defining personality like Kevflix or HorrorSage, but they are, coincidentally, from Dallas and often tag theaters familiar to me like the Texas Theater or the Angelika or the Alamo Drafthouse.
Letterboxd provides a wealth of information directly tied to one of my deepest passions, and I think I’ve figured out the art of flirting within its digital space.
Because profile pictures are often film-related and thus removed from the user’s IRL appearance (mine is a behind-the-scenes picture of Johnny Depp getting covered with fake blood on the set of Wes Craven’s 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street), Letterboxd mutuals reveal themselves through their reviews, lists, and tags. I love users with passions for a certain genre, their diary being a comprehensive collection of movies that sit in that specific artistic space. I appreciate it when someone’s logs are a bit personal: noting what they ate at the theater (bonus points if it’s Cherry Coke), mentioning whom they watched it with, being vulnerable about the state of mind they were in while they were watching. Most importantly, I’m looking for someone who’s not a hater; I’m sick of contrarians who are picky about loving something.
Finding the right cinephile is half the battle. Using the app to win them over is the other.
Set the tone with consistent—but not persistent—likes. It sends a message that you’re aware of their existence and invested in what they have to say without it seeming desperate.
Then move the action to the comments. Don’t underestimate the importance of writing under their review and acknowledging you actually read their recent activity: the logs, the tags, or maybe even the date they watched those films.
The cinephile community is inherently a space of recommendation. Watch one of their endorsements, log it, and be sure to include a direct shout-out in your review. They’ll thank you for it. Now, you share this experience.You co-created it. The two of you co-own this moment.
It gets a bit creative at this point; if the chemistry is there, you need to move it off Letterboxd’s public platform. While well-designed for film-lovers, Letterboxd’s interface eschews any private connection in favor of public communication in comment sections. One option is to tastefully add your phone number to your profile and, during one of your comment section exchanges, tell them with a suave notice to check your profile.
While not as point-and-shoot as typical dating apps, the return to an intentionally manual, slow-burn flirtation is one of Letterboxd’s biggest appeals as a tool for finding your match. By making your profile, you’ve already culled the non-cinephiles; all that’s left is to let the magic of the movies guide the rest.