There’s a peculiar hollowness at the center of People We Meet on Vacation, Netflix’s adaptation of Emily Henry‘s bestselling novel, and I spent much of its running time trying to locate exactly where the vital organs had been removed. The film wants desperately to be a love story about two people who’ve circled each other for a decade, never quite landing—the kind of friends-to-lovers romance that should make you ache with recognition. Instead, it plays like a beautifully photographed travel brochure interrupted by occasional dialogue, characters moving through European backdrops as if they’re hitting marks rather than discovering anything about themselves or each other.
Director Brett Haley, working from a screenplay by Yulin Kuang and the team of Amos Vernon and Nunzio Randazzo, has made something technically competent and almost aggressively pleasant. The cinematography is lovely, the locations—Barcelona, Tuscany, New Orleans—are shot with the glossy sheen of an airline advertisement. But romance isn’t about real estate, and what’s missing is the interiority that made Henry’s novel work in the first place. When you strip a story built on internal monologue down to surface interactions, you’d better have actors who can communicate volumes with a glance, and a script that gives them something meaningful to communicate.
The story follows Poppy Wright (Emily Bader), a New York-based travel writer whose job sounds fabulous on paper but has left her vaguely dissatisfied in the way that only protagonists of romantic comedies ever are. Her former best friend Alex Nilsen (Tom Blyth) is the archetypal quiet, responsible Midwesterner—an English teacher who stayed close to their Ohio hometown while Poppy fled for the coasts. They haven’t spoken in two years following some unnamed incident, and when Poppy learns Alex will be attending his brother David’s wedding in Barcelona, she impulsively lies about having a work assignment there to manufacture a reunion. The film’s opening gambit—a manufactured chance encounter at baggage claim rather than the book’s planned reconciliation trip—is one of Haley’s additions, designed to raise what he calls “movie stakes” versus “book stakes.” It’s a reasonable instinct, but something gets lost in translation: the vulnerability of Poppy deliberately reaching out, admitting she needs Alex back in her life.
The Barcelona setting itself represents the kind of pragmatic compromise that book-to-film adaptations inevitably require. Henry’s novel was set in Palm Springs, a location she chose simply because she loves it—reason enough for a writer, but apparently not for a production budget. Haley has explained that Palm Springs presented insurmountable logistics: no local crew, no tax incentives, and crucially, no geographic connection to the European locations needed for other flashbacks. Spain could double for Tuscany; California could not. The author herself signed off readily enough, noting with characteristic good humor that even the movie Palm Springs wasn’t actually shot in Palm Springs. What mattered, she insisted, was preserving the essential dramatic element: unbearable heat, a broken air conditioner, two people forced into uncomfortable proximity until something has to give.
The film’s structure bounces us between Barcelona and various flashbacks to their summer vacations over the years, attempting to fill in the emotional history that should make us care about whether these two finally get together. We see their initial road trip meeting at Boston College, a camping excursion in Canada, a stint pretending to be newlyweds in New Orleans, and the Tuscan villa where everything went wrong. It’s a lot of jumping around, and Haley handles the temporal shifts cleanly enough, but each flashback feels abbreviated, like watching someone flip through a photo album too quickly to register the faces.
The New Orleans sequence emerges as the film’s most successful stretch, and it’s no coincidence that Haley—a Florida native—has described that city as non-negotiable, one of his favorite places in the world. You can feel his affection in the cinematography, the way he lets the city’s inherent theatricality infuse the fake-newlywed comedy with genuine warmth. It’s the one vacation that feels like an actual vacation rather than a plot delivery mechanism.
The problem is Poppy, and I say this with some reluctance because the character is clearly meant to be endearing in her unfiltered spontaneity. As written for the screen, she comes across as a particularly exhausting brand of quirky—the manic pixie dream girl archetype that we all thought had been retired circa 2015. Bader works hard to inject warmth and vulnerability into the role, and in quieter moments you can glimpse the character this might have been. But the screenplay keeps pushing her toward bits of business—the fidgeting, the oversharing, the relentless perkiness—that read as charming eccentricity on the page but land as something closer to social obliviousness on screen. Early scenes where she bulldozes through Alex’s boundaries play less like the meet-cute friction the film intends and more like a study in why people stop returning certain friends’ calls.
Tom Blyth fares considerably better as Alex, bringing a restrained intelligence to a role that could have been deadly boring. He has a quality of listening that’s essential for playing opposite a motormouth, and when the script gives him room to breathe, he suggests depths of longing and frustration that the dialogue rarely articulates. His Alex is a man who has built a carefully ordered life as a bulwark against loss—we learn his mother died years ago—and Blyth makes you feel both the appeal of that safety and its limitations. In interview, he’s spoken thoughtfully about the challenge of making a repressed, inexpressive character “funny and charming and lovable all at the same time,” and he largely succeeds. In a different kind of adaptation, one that trusted stillness and subtext over constant motion, he might have carried the whole enterprise.
The romance between them should simmer; that’s the point of this particular trope. Two people who are obviously perfect for each other, spending years not quite admitting it, dancing around their attraction while dating other people and maintaining the polite fiction of friendship. Haley clearly understands the difficulty here—he’s noted that few films have successfully navigated the friends-to-lovers dynamic because audiences instinctively want to shout “just get together already” at the screen. The trick is making the hesitation feel earned, making us understand why the risk of losing a friendship would paralyze two otherwise intelligent adults. In People We Meet on Vacation, I understand intellectually that they’re supposed to be yin and yang, the wild child and the homebody, opposite poles of the same magnet. I can describe this dynamic, but I never quite felt it.
What’s most revealing about the adaptation is what got cut—specifically, the sex scene. Henry has been disarmingly candid about this: she saw the original footage and immediately told friends it was “one of the sexiest sex scenes I’ve ever seen in my life,” comparing it to Titanic in its raw tenderness. Then came the test screenings. Audiences unfamiliar with the book found the scene jarring, a “hard right turn” that seemed to belong to a different movie entirely. Haley ultimately made the call to scale back, and Henry—to her credit—supported the decision, invoking the writer’s eternal wisdom about killing your darlings.
But here’s what that choice reveals about the film’s deeper problem: if a sex scene between your romantic leads feels like it belongs to a different movie, the issue isn’t the scene—it’s everything that came before it. The reason audiences felt jolted is that the film hadn’t done the work of building genuine erotic tension. Haley speaks of modeling the tone on classics like When Harry Met Sally and Notting Hill, films where sexuality is suggested rather than shown, and that’s a perfectly defensible artistic choice. But those films earn their restraint through crackling dialogue and palpable chemistry; they make you believe these people can barely keep their hands off each other. People We Meet on Vacation never achieves that combustible quality, so when Poppy and Alex finally kiss in the rain on that Barcelona balcony, it lands with a thud rather than a release.
There’s a sequence set in Tuscany, two years before the present day, where Poppy and Alex vacation with their respective significant others and nearly give in to their feelings during a quiet moment away from the group. The scene works because Haley slows down enough to let the camera find the unspoken communication between them—the way Alex discretely supports Poppy through a pregnancy scare, the almost-kiss that neither acknowledges afterward. For five minutes, the movie achieves the aching intimacy it’s been chasing all along, and then we’re hurled forward to the next plot point, the next pretty location. Henry herself identified Tuscany as the essential trip, the emotional fulcrum of the whole story, and you can see why. It’s the one section where the adaptation captures what made the book resonate.
The supporting cast does what they can with limited material. Molly Shannon and Alan Ruck show up as Poppy’s parents, bringing warmth to what are essentially cameo roles. Sarah Catherine Hook plays Alex’s on-again, off-again girlfriend with quiet dignity, and a late scene between her and Poppy at an airport—where Sarah, now a flight attendant, offers unexpected absolution—hints at a more interesting exploration of how romantic triangles actually resolve themselves.
Henry remained closely involved throughout production, providing Haley with what she describes as a “comprehensive list” of moments readers would expect, the emotional checkboxes that needed ticking. Haley, by his own account, consulted her on every significant change. This is admirable—too many adaptations treat their source material with contempt—but it also raises an uncomfortable question: if the author herself blessed these choices, why does the result feel so thin? The answer, I think, is that faithfulness to plot points isn’t the same as faithfulness to spirit. You can hit every beat on the checklist and still miss what made the story matter.
The contemporary romantic comedy is in a strange place. The old formulas don’t quite work anymore; audiences are too savvy, too aware of the mechanics. But the genre’s basic appeal—watching two people figure out that they belong together—remains potent when handled with sincerity and specificity. The best recent entries, from Set It Up to Red, White & Royal Blue, succeed by committing fully to their emotional stakes, playing the material straight instead of hedging with ironic distance. Romance readers have been particularly vocal in comparing this adaptation unfavorably to the television version of Heated Rivalry, which managed to translate a beloved book into something many fans consider superior to its source. The difference is one of fidelity—not to plot points, but to emotional texture.
Henry has suggested that a director’s cut might someday restore the steamier material, letting audiences see what was sacrificed on the altar of tonal consistency. I suspect that version would be more interesting than what we got—not because explicitness equals quality, but because a film willing to take that risk might have been willing to take others. As it stands, People We Meet on Vacation plays it safe at every turn, sanding down edges until nothing remains that might snag.
Netflix will do fine with this. It’s the kind of film that will auto-play after something else, that people will half-watch on a Sunday afternoon while scrolling through their phones, and perhaps that’s the right way to experience it—as pleasant background noise, a reminder that love exists somewhere, between beautiful people in beautiful places. But Emily Bader and Tom Blyth deserve better, and so does the audience that actually wants to feel something. Romance, done right, is one of cinema’s great pleasures. This isn’t terrible. It’s just not quite there—a vacation postcard where a love letter should be.
