Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love In The Villa’ on Netflix, A Low-Brow Rom-Com Set In Italy

Love In The Villa is the latest Netflix rom-com to debut this summer, after films like A Perfect Pairing, Wedding Season, Purple Hearts, and Hello, Goodbye and Everything In Between. This one utilizes the typical romantic comedy formula of enemies to lovers – does its romantic Italian setting create a lasting spark?

LOVE IN THE VILLA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Third grade teacher and Romeo and Juliet obsessive Julie (Kat Graham) is planning a detailed trip to Verona with her boyfriend Brandon (Raymond Ablack) to visit the city that screams love to her. But when Brandon asks for space, she’s forced to go on the trip herself. When she arrives at the villa she’s booked in the heart of Verona, she finds yet another nasty surprise: the villa has been double-booked, and she’ll have to share the apartment with a British wine seller Charlie (Tom Hopper), whom she butts heads with immediately. After a tit-for-tat set of pranks, the duo call a truce and begin to learn things about one another, secretly falling in love. All is going well until both of their exes arrive in town to win them back, and Julie and Charlie will have to decide where their heart lies.

What Will It Remind You Of?: With a heroine that loves the idea of love more than anything, the film has shades of 27 Dresses, though it lacks the cast chemistry and snappy dialogue of the 2008 flick.

Performance Worth Watching: Ablack as Julie’s on-and-off boyfriend doesn’t get much screen time but fills his moments with enough charm to carry the whole movie.

Memorable Dialogue: “Don’t call me. Don’t text me. The next time your phone doesn’t ring? That’s me.” One of the few actually unique and funny lines appears when Julie and Charlie have their big blowout fight and storm off in opposite directions.

Sex and Skin: Surprisingly, none.

Our Take: The Netflix film slate tries to cover every bucket from Oscar nominees to popcorn thrillers, and lately their focus seems to be on overtaking Lifetime’s signature low-brow romance films. Love in the Villa is something you’d probably find on that cable channel with low production value, stilted dialogue, and a cast that generally lacks chemistry with one another.

Graham, who is most recognizable from Vampire Diaries plays the whimsical Julie with little excitement and fanfare. Much is made about how “weird” Julie is, but she’s really just an anxious teacher who loves the idea of love — aka a typical rom-com heroine. Opposite her is Hopper who appeared sporadically on Game of Thrones, and the two of them often feel like they’re not sharing the same frame, let alone the same movie.

As an enemies to lovers plot, the story doesn’t exactly earn their shift in emotions. For most of the first half, the duo are trying to find any reason to get the other to leave the villa, sometimes even resorting to having the other arrested. Then, magically, they call a truce and immediately feelings start to shift, which feels unrealistic and unearned. To top it off, the dialogue is filled with lines you’ve heard before (like “that’s low, even for you”) that make it feel like something you’ve already seen before. And that’s because you have, in a million other different Lifetime movies.

Our Call: SKIP IT. This film rehashes genre tropes instead of reinventing them.

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Vulture, Teen Vogue, Paste Magazine, and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.