*This article contains spoilers for the book and Netflix movie, People We Meet on Vacation. Read at your own risk!*
The romcom is back. And I’m absolutely and wonderfully living for it.
Like most of the country (and probably the world), I was fervently waiting for January 9th, when the movie-fied version of Emily Henry’s beloved novel, People We Meet on Vacation, would drop on Netflix. Teasers for the movie had already infiltrated my Instagram Reels home page and my Friends tab, with my friends’ profile icons and the little hearts on them accumulating in the bottom-left corner. Seeing what was to come with the movie—especially Emily Bader and Tom Blyth acting together—only fueled my excitement. As someone who had never picked up an Emily Henry book before then, but only watched the quick promo videos and the teasers, it was clear that Netflix was onto something big.
When January 9th rolled around, I was at the edge of my seat. By that evening, my best friend had already watched it (and wouldn’t give me spoilers, boo. But good for her because this is definitely something to watch sans spoilers…). Reaction clips (especially edits of Tom Blyth’s dancing) were, once again, all over my Instagram Reels home page and Friends tab. Over its launch weekend (January 10th through January 12th), it “debuted to 17.2 million views,” per Variety. Clips of Emily Bader’s and Tom Blyth’s interviews on the Tonight Show and the stars reacting to scenes of the movie on Netflix’s YouTube Channel also started filtering through my social media, each with hundreds of thousands of likes and comments. Even on the websites I would visit, whether I was doing research for my thesis or double-checking the measurements for the brownie recipe my sister and I were following to the T, ads were popping up on every banner for the book and Emily Henry’s other books.
So, I curled up on the couch with my family as our dog slept nearby (he didn’t get much of a nap in with all the squealing and yelling that soon ensued). We finally clicked play, as one of many viewers contributing to the film’s “#1 in Movies Today” title at the time. My living room was suddenly transformed as we were greeted with the sound of seagulls squawking and waves crashing.
As someone who grew up watching romcoms, staring starry-eyed at dramatic love confessions, sobbing when the main characters had the all-out misunderstanding, and putting Andie’s yellow dress on my wish-list, when I read Hello! Magazine’s headline, “Viewers declare ‘romcoms are back’…” I was excited to see how director, Brett Haley, and producers, Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Emily Henry, and Laura Quicksilver, brought back the nostalgia of the classic ‘romcom’ back to life. But that isn’t to say that romcoms haven’t been a thing since the ones we’ve grown up with, watched and rewatched and rewatched, and loved the most. While I am the biggest fan of the yearly Hallmark Christmas movies (including the recent one that was filmed in Newport!) and have binged my way through The Summer I Turned Pretty and other 12-season, provider-exclusive shows with a strong, no-nonsense heroine and an enemies-to-lovers subplot, there’s just a certain je ne sais quoi from the classics: 10 Things I Hate About You, While You Were Sleeping, Notting Hill, How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, When Harry Met Sally, Crazy Rich Asians, and so on and so forth. But! People We Meet on Vacation creates its own kind of magic through the “catchy soundtracks and sizzling chemistry” and Emily Henry’s loveable female and male leads, played by Emily Bader and Tom Blyth, respectively, all while playing homage to all those quintessential romcom scenes like Ben’s jaw-drop to Andie’s *iconic* yellow dress and Harry and Sally at the diner.
The era of the romcom is not dead, I thus profess. It is alive and thriving thanks to People We Meet on Vacation. There are spoilers below, so read with caution and 100% at your own risk!
As the intro scene pans from the crashing blue waves, we meet Poppy Wright (Bader) on a beach, reading a book in an orange swimsuit. We learn more about her job (she’s a writer for R+R and is currently in a rut) and that she supposedly missed out on RSVP’ing for a friend’s wedding. The kicker? David (the groom-to-be) sent the invite months ago!
About seven minutes in, Poppy clicks on a contact in her phone. It belongs to Alex Nilsen (Blyth), her best friend, David’s brother, and longtime crush. Immediately, as Poppy is stuck in wistful thoughts, and as the scene of her apartment is cast in shadow, we flash back to nine summers ago, as Poppy runs through a parking lot, dragging suitcases and holding backpacks as she’s moving out of college for the summer.
Throughout the movie, we’re taken through the main storyline, which concerns Poppy’s travels to Barcelona and the rekindling of her relationship with Alex, along with the many different vacations they have taken together, including Canada, New Orleans (iykyk), Norway, and the long-awaited Tuscany. Each flashback to these vacations further builds the backstory between Poppy and Alex, not before starting with their awkward commute from Boston back to Linfield, Ohio. Sometime throughout the movie—if you hadn’t picked up on the vibes in the intro—we come to the crushing realization: they’re in love with one another, or, at least, we’re definitely sure Poppy is with Alex.
But back to the beginning, and about the problem of Poppy’s invitation to David’s wedding in Barcelona, where Alex will 100% be there, after the disaster of whatever happened in Tuscany and his on-and-off relationship with high school sweetheart, Sarah, who definitely does *not* hate Poppy’s guts. So, Poppy does what every girl who’s ever been a girl does: she calls him after a particularly adrenaline-inducing spin class. He answers, she goes slack-brained, et voila! Poppy has to somehow figure out how to convince her boss to get an all-expenses-paid work trip to Barcelona, for what could very well be her last chance to reconnect with Alex the way they used to, especially since the flame between them has been extinguished for the last two years. Post-Tuscany.
Fast-forward a bit, there’s the cruddy Barcelona apartment with the broken AC and plastic sheets over the windows (this will 100% be important later) that Poppy and Alex both arrive to, with Alex’s heroic efforts to fix it thwarted by everyone’s worst fear: back pain.
Then there’s the wedding, the flashbacks, the rain, the dancefloor…aaaand that’s all the spoilers I’ll give for now. If you want to know more, watch the movie!
But with all the famous book-to-movie adaptations, there has been some disagreement online about the success of People We Meet on Vacation, especially concerning its faithfulness to Henry’s 2021 novel.
I’ve seen TikTok exposés and popular articles listing all the aspects of the book the movie left out, especially how Poppy’s and Alex’s characters were developed, Palm Springs versus Barcelona, and the importance of Tuscany and Croatia as distinct locations. And while I’m with the book girlies on faithfulness to the original novel (as a Classics major, I’m just waiting for Nolan’s The Odyssey to hit theatres…), I thought that the movie was approachable from both angles.
The me who watched the movie before reading the book thought that the pacing was effortless and, while predictable for certain scenes, made me fall in love with the characters and feel Alex’s pain through Poppy’s speak-before-you-think confession after the pregnancy scare and Poppy’s determination to catch up to Alex as she ran through the picturesque streets of one Linfield, Ohio.
In the novel, we learn much more about Henry’s characters, like the fact that Alex is so attached to Linfield, not because he doesn’t crave spontaneous change and the wonders of world-travelling, but because of not wanting to leave his dad behind, given how much his mother’s death affected his dad. We learn that Poppy isn’t just the ‘too-much,’ noncommittal, girl-without-a-plan character-type, but someone for whom Linfield, Ohio holds awful memories. In the film, we miss Poppy’s strong confrontation of Jason Stanley (on the subway no less!), who started the “Porny Poppy” rumor. In the film, we miss the entirety of the Croatia trip, and everything that comes with Tuscany and Croatia being two separate (and very different) trips with very different events. In that sense, I won’t negate completely that the film robbed us of a lot of the poignant, soul-crushing moments that Emily Henry conveyed to her readers through her writing and the specific locations she chose for the book’s setting.
However, it honestly gave me an excuse to order the book ASAP and binge-read it in a period of less than 24 hours (whoops!). For me, both the movie and the book can and should co-exist in their own separate categories. And I’m honestly okay with both, just the way they are. As a film adaptation, yes, Barcelona was an interesting choice for the book, wherein Palm Springs’ heat (as a native Californian, yeowch summer gets hoooot there) and Nikolai’s typical AirBnB host response time are the catalyst for the results of Poppy and Alex’s relationship development after eleven summers of vacations. There were changes in the movie’s script from the book’s basic plot that, having later read the book and then rewatched the movie, felt like a big headscratcher as I stared at the screen, demanding, “Why did you change that part?”
But as I rewatched the movie after reading the book, I felt exactly the same way I had when I saw it for the first time, pre- my Emily Henry book-a-thon (current read is Book Lovers!). The smiles at the rain-laden confession on the Barcelona balcony, the awes when hand-holding hater Alex Nilsen held Poppy’s hand, and the sobs when she’s running and running and running (did I mention that Poppy hates running?) and almost loses him to a red light.
My verdict? People We Meet on Vacation (the film) is perfect just the way it is, with its missing dialogues, vacations, and life-changing plot points from the book. Does the R&R-sponsored trip to Barcelona completely change the plot? Yes. Did Alex’s proposal to Sarah completely shock me? Also yes. But I was glued to the screen, watching Poppy’s and Alex’s every microexpression (cue the Mr. Darcy look at Poppy’s dress, ugh!!) and thoroughly enjoying the cinematography, the music, the acting, and so so so much more. It is the quintessential feel-good movie that was so comforting and immediately makes you want to watch it over and over again. I know that I will fall in love with Emily Bader’s Poppy and Tom Blyth’s Alex every time I click the Netflix play button, as many times as I watch it.
And while I’ve seen suggestions that People We Meet on Vacation should have been a limited series, where each episode could have been a different vacation, I’ll just leave what Emily Henry said to People Magazine here: “The things that were lost, I feel like they’re still in the book. They’re always going to be in the book.”
So yes. I did love People We Meet on Vacation, both novel and film. Hands down, 10/10 for me. Would I recommend it to probably the 1% of my friends who still haven’t watched it? An enthusiastic, unequivocal, yes!
At the end of the day, Poppy’s and Alex’s characters show us that we can never be “too-much” for the *right* people who love us. While my Instagram Reels page is still filled with movie clips, it is also filled with videos captioned “forever a poppy girl” (@emilygstephens) and “when he wants someone nonchalant, but i’m literally poppy wright” (@moviewatchinggirl). What book Poppy and movie Poppy (who I contend Emily Bader does absolute and complete justice to) represent is that no one should have to entirely change who they are, their clothes, their likes and dislikes, their music taste, their careers, their wants and goals in life to fit for someone. As Poppy herself says toward the end of the film, “Home is where you can entirely be yourself.” And sometimes, compromise is necessary even with the right person, as we see Poppy and Alex end up splitting their time between New York and Linfield in the novel, or even Alex teaching at Sarah Lawrence in the film. And at the same time, as we go through life, we grow and change, finding the things that fit us by growing out of those that don’t fit us anymore. TLDR: People We Meet on Vacation shows us that the right person is someone who responds “I’m only weird when I’m with you” to your “I love it when you get weird”.
If friends-to-lovers, timeskips, angst before happily-ever-after endings, and a man who yearns are tropes and/or themes that sound up your alley… People We Meet on Vacation (the movie) is now streaming on Netflix, with a run-time of 117 minutes (~2 hours). People We Meet on Vacation (the novel) is available for purchase through this Amazon link. Happy watching, or reading!