People We Meet on Vacation would make hella money in a theater. It’s got everything you want in a romcom, and would lead to so many makeouts in the dark. I guess now those makeouts would happen in the basement, as Netflix brings you the perfect “and chill” to cozy up with the person you love. And vacay!
Poppy Wright (Emily Bader) has the dream job of dream jobs: globe hopping, reviewing amazing tourist destinations. But her boss Swapna (Jameela Jamil) is unhappy with Poppy’s writing for a bit now, as her vacations have been tainted since she stopped doing them with her friend Alex (Tom Blyth) for a few years now. Vowing to be better, Poppy decides it’s time to reconnect with Alex, meeting him in Barcelona where Alex’s brother David (Miles Heizer) is getting married.
Director Brett Haley uses the book’s structure as his own, a great conceit. People We Meet on Vacation is told through vacation flashbacks, filling us in on Poppy and Alex’s relationship to the present day. We basically get New Orleans and Barcelona as our big two locations for cost savings, but we’re out on Bourbon Street and on La Rambla and the Barcelona beaches, and Haley uses the rest of the city to make us feel like we’re globetrotting. Each section is filled with some fun com, closing with some rom. There’s classic naked pratfalls, dance numbers, pregnancy scares, and awkward bed sharing as you might expect. It all looks bright and fun, as we go from camping, to bar crawling, to villa life, etc, perfect fantasy backdrop for love to blossom.
So a lot is riding on Emily Bader and Tom Blyth. Even though the first car ride from Boston College to Linfield, Ohio is written too broadly, the two leads quickly find their rhythms with each other, with motormouth Poppy suffocating Alex from nonstop monologuing. The connection becomes more and more evident between them, as the free spirit Poppy starts to open up the closed off Alex out of his shell from vacation to vacation. We feel the rise and fall of their relationship by the 90 minute mark, with Blyth especially making Alex an interesting character and Bader’s intoxicating charisma turning sour the deeper the two get. But that only makes the sizzle hotter, as each comes to David’s wedding looking fly as hell, making me blush thinking about it. Being a silly Netflix romcom, the movie finds the perfect, nuanced ending…then keeps going to the safe ending. It still works though, because Bader and Blyth are awesome together, and sell the heck out of their globe hopping romance.
People We Meet on Vacation is a great but misleading title. Vacation Me might be better. Emily Bader, fair warning though. Don’t get too close to Mr. Blyth, or he’ll send you to the sunrise on the reaping, where you WILL not make it, despite your writing acumen.