{"id":396920,"date":"2026-01-09T09:05:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T09:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/396920\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T09:05:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T09:05:11","slug":"people-we-meet-on-vacation-review-an-undemanding-netflix-romcom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/396920\/","title":{"rendered":"‘People We Meet on Vacation’ Review: An Undemanding Netflix Romcom"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNew York Times bestselling author Emily Henry is happy to own her reputation as a merchant of breezy, disposable beach reads, to the point that her first adult novel was plainly titled \u201cBeach Read.\u201d The first film adaptation of a Henry title to reach the screen, beating at least three other projects in development, \u201cPeople We Meet on Vacation<\/a>\u201d is similarly straightforward about its aspirations: It even opens with a wink-wink shot of its heroine reclining on a quiet beach, reading a book that may as well be one of Henry\u2019s, before the page is spattered with some passing bird excrement from on high. With this introduction of a hapless protagonist not entirely managing to live her best life, Brett Haley<\/a>\u2018s film cheerfully speaks both the literary and cinematic language of romantic comedy \u2014 and won\u2019t seek to subvert or elevate it in the two hours that follow.<\/p>\n

\n\tAll of which is completely fine. A summer-soaked Netflix<\/a> release cannily scheduled to counter the January fug, \u201cPeople We Meet on Vacation\u201d offers no surprises, to an audience that isn\u2019t after any. From the second that free spirit Poppy (Emily Bader<\/a>) and straitlaced Alex (Tom Blyth<\/a>) meet as ill-matched college students, you know where they\u2019re going to end up, and precisely how they\u2019re going to end up there. Moreover, the film knows that you know: It offers the comforting satisfaction of pieces falling predictably into place to any viewers wishing their own life would slot together so neatly. \u201cI thought I knew what I wanted in life \u2014 it turns out I had no idea,\u201d Poppy says at one point. She\u2019s pretty much alone in not getting the memo.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor most of the film\u2019s nine-year timeframe, at least, what Poppy mistakenly thinks she wants is a life less obvious. One of the few things she and Alex have in common at the outset is a shared hometown in the sleepy and fictitious Linfield, Ohio, though they\u2019ve never met before \u2014 and where she\u2019s bursting with plans to escape the place, he\u2019s all too eager to nest there. At the end of their final term at Boston College, he gives her a ride back to the Midwest, cuing a passive-aggressive two-day road trip. Any resemblance to the setup of \u201cWhen Harry Met Sally\u201d is not remotely coincidental, though the character dynamics are gender-flipped: Here, he\u2019s the uptight square, and she\u2019s the wisecracking agent of chaos.<\/p>\n

\n\tBar that minor variation, \u201cPeople We Meet on Vacation\u201d is wholly deferent to Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron\u2019s standard-bearing romcom, bringing little new generational perspective to the question of whether straight men and women can be friends without sex getting in the way. (Spoiler alert: the answer is still \u201cnot in this genre, no.\u201d) The structure is a bit tricksier, flipping between the present \u2014 which finds our two inevitable lovers estranged and in their early thirties \u2014 and a staggered series of flashbacks catching up to it. <\/p>\n

\n\tHaving eventually become platonic friends via that post-college trip to Linfield, Poppy and Alex resolve to meet every year for a shared summer vacation, even as their lives take very different paths: hers as a jet-setting New York-based travel writer for a glossy magazine, his as a homebody academic still rooted in Ohio. The past vacation sequences, hopping from New Orleans to Tuscany to the Canadian wilderness, repeatedly stress the point of how adorkably perfect they are for each other, even as assorted other love interests keep coming between them. In the present, they\u2019re awkwardly reunited for his brother\u2019s destination wedding in Barcelona, following two years of mutual silent treatment. The rift isn\u2019t explained until later, though as with everything here, you can confidently fill in the gaps.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat keeps things diverting, and sometimes even interesting, is the genuine but necessarily tentative chemistry between its stars, one staging an all-out charm offensive and the other projecting a flintier allure. Amid the big, cute, relatably klutzy gestures required of the character, Bader (\u201cParanormal Activity: Next of Kin,\u201d Amazon Prime\u2019s \u201cMy Lady Jane\u201d) gives Poppy a groggy, between-the-lines wistfulness that\u2019s less expected, leaving one curious to see her in more knottily written film roles. Blyth hasn\u2019t wanted for those of late: \u201cPeople We Meet on Vacation\u201d represents quite a departure from tougher arthouse assignments like \u201cPlainclothes,\u201d \u201cWasteman\u201d and Claire Denis\u2019s \u201cThe Fence,\u201d though his quiet, nervy quality goes a long way toward humanizing a character described, not unreasonably, by one of Poppy\u2019s more glamorous exes as \u201ca bit of a wet lettuce.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s one of the tangier lines in a film that, like many of its contemporary peers in a genre lately consigned to the streamingverse, is heavier on rom than com. The script \u2014 credited to three writers, though you\u2019d be forgiven for assuming an even larger committee \u2014 maintains a general buoyancy of tone to compensate for a shortage of outright jokes; a setpiece involving a goofily drunken dance to Paula Abdul\u2019s \u201cForever Your Girl\u201d is the closest we get to farce. A decade on from his tender indie sleeper \u201cI\u2019ll See You in My Dreams,\u201d Haley steers proceedings in more proficiently impersonal fashion, while DP Rob C. Givens takes the tonal directive \u201csunny\u201d as an all-out aesthetic mission statement. Yellow-filtered to the max, the film looks veritably marinated in Hawaiian Tropic. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry is happy to own her reputation as a merchant of breezy,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[115753,115752,88,217,115750,84121],"class_list":{"0":"post-396920","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-brett-haley","9":"tag-emily-bader","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-netflix","12":"tag-people-we-meet-on-vacation","13":"tag-tom-blyth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}