‘People We Meet on Vacation’ Review: Netflix’s Formulaic but Harmless Rom-Com

The traditional twenty-something romantic comedy is still alive and kicking thanks to streaming platforms. Netflix, in particular, seems to have given the genre a permanent home, complete with its own style, star system, and something that increasingly resembles a standardized format. Netflix rom-coms are essentially cleaner, safer, presentable versions of better movies made in the past. It’s not a rigid formula, but you can feel it: most of them resemble something you’ve already seen, borrowing elements from well-known romantic comedies and regurgitating them in tidy, weekend-afternoon-on-the-couch-friendly packages. The audiovisual equivalent of a “beach read.”

People We Meet on Vacation was exactly that in its literary incarnation: a beach read that shot to the top of bestseller lists. Written by Emily Henry—author of six novels that have sold several million copies in the past six years alone—the story openly positions itself as a tribute to When Harry Met Sally. Two friends who meet, bond, drift apart, reconnect, and circle each other over the course of a decade: the similarities to Rob Reiner’s classic are hard to miss. The main difference? Vacations…

Poppy (Emily Bader) writes travel columns for a magazine and spends her life hopping from plane to plane. She hates planning, prefers to follow her impulses, and while she’s a bit worn down by all the movement, she’s fully adapted to that nomadic existence. In the film’s present, she’s invited to a wedding in Barcelona where Alex (Tom Blyth, The Fence) will be in attendance—a prospect that gives her pause, since they haven’t seen each other in quite some time. That invitation becomes the narrative excuse for a series of flashbacks that explain who they are, what they were to each other, and what went wrong between them.

From there, People We Meet on Vacation moves back and forth between past and present, starting at the beginning: a shared trip from the Boston college they attended to their mutual hometown, Linfield, Ohio—taken together before they really knew each other. Their differences quickly surface. Poppy is blown wherever the wind takes her; Alex prefers an organized, carefully planned life, ideally rooted in the town Poppy is always trying to escape. And yet, a tentative bond forms, shaped by a handful of mildly unfortunate adventures. The rest of the film follows their annual vacation reunions in different corners of the world—friendly getaways that carefully avoid crossing the line they’ve both drawn.

Where all this is headed is obvious from minute one, and the film makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. The real question is whether there’s chemistry between the leads and whether the audience can emotionally invest in their relationship. In People We Meet on Vacation, the answer is a qualified yes—but a fairly decaf one. They’re pleasant, likable, mildly charismatic (she more so than he, whose appeal seems to rely more on muscles and intense gazes than on actual charm). They’re not exactly fascinating, more like the kind of people you meet once, have nothing bad to say about, but might struggle to remember by name.

The same could be said of the movie itself—and perhaps of the Netflix rom-com as a genre. When they work (which isn’t always), they’re polished, inoffensive products that won’t harm viewers and may entertain them for a while, even if they never come close to the classics they imitate. Like the novels they’re based on, they’re designed to be consumed on beaches, in airports, or even on a phone (everything is shot and edited so you won’t miss much on a small screen) and forgotten shortly afterward. This one won’t leave a bad taste—but no one is going to mistake it for the real thing.