People We Meet on Vacation
Director: Brett Haley
Cert: None
Genre: Romantic comedy
Starring: Emily Bader, Tom Blyth, Lukas Gage, Jameela Jamil, Alan Ruck, Molly Shannon
Running Time: 1 hr 57 mins
Alex is handsome and uptight, and hates saxophone solos. Poppy is hyperactive and messy, and loves Kenny G. Alex wants to settle down in his Ohio hometown with his high-school sweetheart, Sarah. Poppy wants to be anywhere but Ohio.
Adapted from the beachy bestseller by Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation follows Alex and Poppy over a decade of romantic dilly-dallying, starting with a much-delayed carpool journey that improbably coalesces into will-they-won’t-they best-friendship.
Emily Bader, the star of the cancelled cult favourite My Lady Jane, runs every sentence as the livewire heroine. Tom Blyth, an actor with highfalutin credits (Benediction, Plainclothes) and lead roles in Billy the Kid and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, is merely required to look chiselled and plaintive as Poppy’s friend-zoned significant other.
Romcoms pivot around bad timing, romantic misunderstandings and improbably luxurious interiors. Netflix romcoms pivot around trips to Paris – and sometimes beyond.
The best-friends arrangement to holiday annually and Poppy’s nomadic career as a travel writer provide the temporal scaffolding for Bader’s book. Various exotic holiday destinations, including New Orleans and Barcelona, are revealed in signposted flashbacks.
The chronological leaping around to pop tunes by Taylor Swift, Boygenius and Billie Eilish is the most interesting thing about Brett Haley’s sunny, saccharine film. The rest is flimsy.
The carefully calibrated friends-to-lovers trajectory mapped by When Harry Met Sally or Love & Basketball is eschewed in favour of wholly unconvincing make-or-break moments. The miscommunications that keep the couple apart are ill defined. The seasoned comic actors Alan Ruck, Jameela Jamil and Molly Shannon are criminally underused. Colin Wilkes’s sleek costumes can’t compensate for the lack of onscreen chemistry. They might as well be wearing hazmat suits.
On Netflix from Friday, January 9th