Netflix’s “People We Meet on Vacation” Review: Romance Swirls a Sun-Soaked Wanderlust

Vacations are wonderful. For a short stretch of time, responsibilities blur, expectations soften, and life feels open to possibility in ways it rarely does at home, whether it is an island getaway, a foodie escapade, or simply wandering through a city rich with history and memory.

“People don’t take trips, trips take people,” as author John Steinbeck once observed. We travel expecting something to change, even if we cannot quite articulate what that change should be. In that sense, a vacation becomes a compressed version of life itself, a dense, almost neutron-star-like cluster of experiences, spontaneity, and wonder. Yet it is also threaded with uncertainty, because transformation is never guaranteed, and disappointment often travels quietly alongside hope.

That same promise of transformation sits at the heart of Netflix’s golden-hued romantic comedy “People We Meet on Vacation,” starring Emily Bader and Tom Blyth.

The eponymous adaptation of Emily Henry’s bestselling novel understands that travel is less about discovery than displacement. Directed by Brett Haley, the film follows Poppy Wright (Emily Bader) and Alex Nilsen (Tom Blyth) as they navigate adulthood not merely in search of love, but in search of emotional clarity, using each annual trip as a temporary refuge from lives that feel increasingly unresolved.

The film opens with Poppy’s ironic musings on what vacations are supposed to be. She narrates travel as a connection, striking up conversations with strangers, being bolder, freer, and more willing to follow her heart. There is talk of romance, solitude, and reinvention. Yet the imagery that accompanies her words quietly betrays those ideals, revealing a version of travel that feels isolating, performative, and emotionally hollow rather than liberating.

It soon becomes apparent that this contradiction exists entirely in Poppy’s head as she races against a deadline. When her editor, Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith (Jameela Jamil), catches her describing a travel experience as “gradually decomposing,” the film lands its thesis with gentle precision. Poppy is not simply experiencing writer’s block. She is unravelling in a way that feels quietly urgent. The life she once chased with such certainty no longer fits. The places she visits can no longer distract her from that growing dissonance.

Enter Alex, nine summers earlier. Their meeting is not born from romance or shared wanderlust, but from logistics. He is merely the one driving her to where she needs to go. From the outset, the contrast is unmistakable. Poppy is a torrent of nervous energy, unfiltered thoughts, and emotional immediacy. Alex, by contrast, seeks quiet, responding with patience, restraint, and a dry wit that keeps him from receding entirely into the background.

Poppy is an Energiser Bunny on a sugar rush, all impulse and momentum. Alex is measured, cautious, and deeply rooted. Conventional wisdom insists that opposites attract. “People We Meet on Vacation,” however, is more interested in how opposites learn to coexist. Across years and destinations, their bond deepens not because they change one another. It deepens because they grant each other permission to exist honestly, without performance or correction. That quiet allowance becomes the most intoxicating escape the film has to offer. It persists even as secrets and emotional evasions accumulate along the way.

The film’s relative disinterest in the act of travel itself is not necessarily a flaw. Destinations function less as lived-in spaces than as emotional containers, places where Poppy and Alex can temporarily suspend the gravity of their real lives. There are a few lingering shots designed to sell wanderlust, no indulgent montages of cuisine or culture. By Swapna’s standards, this would be a poor travel feature. “People We Meet on Vacation” has no desire to function as a brochure for a holiday fair. The film is far more invested in what happens when two people are removed from consequence. It explores what unfolds when they are allowed to exist in emotional stasis.

That tunnel vision, however, comes at a cost. The film is intensely focused on the one week each year when Poppy and Alex are together, and we as the audience still don’t really know that much about who they are during the other fifty-one. Careers, relationships, and personal histories appear only when narratively convenient, then recede. The romance feels emotionally sincere in the moment, yet oddly suspended in time, as though their lives only fully animate when they are on vacation.

Still, the film’s emotional pull is undeniable, largely because of the chemistry between Emily Bader and Tom Blyth. Bader shoulders the film’s expressive weight, grounding Poppy’s restlessness in vulnerability rather than affectation. Blyth, meanwhile, delivers a performance defined by restraint, a quality he wields with increasing confidence following his commanding turn as Coriolanus Snow in “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” Here, he trades menace for melancholy, crafting an Alex whose quiet longing and emotional repression feel deliberate rather than dull.

That intimacy is further amplified by a soundtrack that feels rather Swiftie-coded, at least according to our own clowning delusions. It might very well not be. Beyond the overt needle drop of Swift’s “August,” the film’s musical sensibility evokes the wistful melancholy of “New Year’s Day.” It also carries the quiet emotional reckoning of “Fortnight.” Whether intentional or not, the effect itself is unmistakable in creating a fleeting mood of love.

By the end, “People We Meet on Vacation” understands that love has never been Poppy and Alex’s central problem. Their true obstacle is fear, timing, and the emotional safety found in postponement. They keep returning to the same unresolved place, indulging the fantasy of togetherness without the risk of permanence. In that way, the film mirrors the experience of travel itself, offering a version of life that feels freer and more romantic than reality, fully aware that it cannot last.

And perhaps that is the point. Like a well-loved destination we return to time and again, “People We Meet on Vacation” refuses to offer a blueprint for the future. It does not try to map out what comes next. Instead, it invites us into an imperfect escape. This escape allows us to pause and breathe. It recognises why so many of us choose to linger in the in-between, if only for a little while longer.

Yet for all its charm and a certain warmth, “People We Meet on Vacation” never quite moves beyond “pleasantly middling.” It still moves along the sequence of romantic beats that, while competently executed, rarely surprises. Conflicts are resolved conveniently, emotional stakes are sometimes underdeveloped, and plot devices, like misunderstandings or convenient absences, feel engineered more to keep the story moving than to deepen it.

By the end, we have seen Poppy and Alex laugh, reminisce, and squabble across the globe. We have witnessed moments of tenderness and quiet longing. But the film does not linger long enough in any of them to leave a lasting impression. The emotional highs are soft, the lows largely glossed over, and while the performances ground the story, the story itself rarely takes root. It is easy to enjoy in the moment, but just as easy to forget once the credits roll.

Ultimately, “People We Meet on Vacation” is a comfortably watchable rom-com, a “mid” experience in the sense that it does what is expected without overreaching. It can fill an evening, provide a few laughs, and offer the pleasure of two actors who genuinely inhabit their roles. But beyond that, it struggles to linger emotionally, making it the kind of movie you might watch on a quiet night, with the background on, rather than one that demands full attention or leaves a mark afterwards.

“People We Meet on Vacation” is currently streaming on Netflix.