The Netflix confection Love in the Villa invokes two well-established traditions. There’s the general romcom formula – two characters at odds, a meet-cute, a deception/reveal, an epiphany, a repeated inside joke, someone running somewhere in a time crunch. And then there’s the manufactured flavors of Netflix comfort food: recognizable B-to-C-list talent, cheesy locale, banal Twitter-inflected jokes, distinctively cheap-looking production, passable but not particularly invigorating chemistry. Written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, Love in the Villa combines both into another ephemeral confection off the streaming assembly line – inoffensive and baseline pleasurable yet immediately forgettable.
The hook here is that the central couple, played by The Vampire Diaries’s Kat Graham and Umbrella Academy’s Tom Hopper, meet in picturesque Verona – as corny a romantic location as it gets but excellent eye candy during the twilight of a summer in which seemingly every celebrity visited Italy. Verona is, of course, the setting of Romeo and Juliet or, as Graham’s Julie tells her classroom of third-grade students, “the most romantic and tragic love story of all time”. True to form, Julie is a hopeless overachieving romantic dialed up to 11 – she dreams of seeing Juliet’s balcony in Verona, she laminates her travel plans and designates 7% of vacation time for “spontaneity”.
