Adapted from the eponymous novel by BookTok favourite Taylor Jenkins Reid, this sanitised melodrama is so algorithm-baked and slathered in life lessons it makes butane-sniffing seem like the preferable option. Phillipa Soo plays Emma, a Massachusetts bookseller caught in the living hell of a Shang-Chi/Point Break sandwich: about to marry her childhood best friend Sam (Simu Liu), she is bowled over when previous hunk of a husband Jesse (Luke Bracey) – who went missing in a helicopter crash on their first wedding anniversary – suddenly turns up with full Robinson Crusoe beard.
Jesse actually has been trapped on a desert island for four years. But that’s the level of subtlety Andy Fickman’s mercilessly photogenic love triangle operates on, initially hyping up Emma and Jesse’s digital nomad lifestyle: she’s a journo filing hot dispatches on “Five Beijing street foods to start your days”, he’s an aspiring documentary-maker. When he goes MIA, Emma seeks solace running the family bookstore and being fed a recovery diet of Thoreau and Joan Didion by her sister. All the better for us to be later caught up in optimally configured romantic agony when she realises that, with a fiance and a husband on the go, she loves both men equally.
