Directed by Kat Coiro | Written by Ryan Engle | Starring Halle Bailey, Regé-Jean Page
There’s a version of You, Me & Tuscany that’s a sparkling, sun-soaked romance worth gushing about. The ingredients are all there: a charismatic leading pair, rolling Italian hillsides, a premise built on cheerful absurdity, and enough fairy-tale energy to power a dozen Hallmark movies. What’s on screen is somewhere between that dream and a missed opportunity. It’s not bad, exactly. It’s just okay, and in a genre that lives and dies by chemistry and momentum, “okay” can feel like a shrug.
Halle Bailey plays Anna, a culinary school dropout scraping by as a house sitter in New York City. After losing her latest gig in spectacularly embarrassing fashion, she wanders into a hotel bar and strikes up a tipsy, flirtatious evening with Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), a handsome Italian businessman. He doesn’t sweep her off her feet, but he does leave her a note the next morning suggesting she use an old ticket her late mother bought for a trip to Tuscany. Anna goes. She ends up in Matteo’s unoccupied villa. His family finds her there. She panics, accidentally implies she’s his fiancée, and decides to just… lean into it. You’ve seen this setup before, and the film knows you have.
Into this tangle walks Michael, Matteo’s British Italian cousin, played by Regé-Jean Page. If you watched Bridgerton and spent the whole time hoping Page would just stay on screen forever, this movie was made with you specifically in mind. He’s compelling in the role, sporting a quiet intensity and a knack for deadpan humor that makes him the most watchable thing in most scenes he’s in. When he’s needling Anna or working through his complicated feelings about his family, the film actually hums. When the script asks him to be straightforwardly swoony, he’s a touch less convincing, but honestly, nobody’s complaining too loudly.
Bailey is likable throughout, and she brings a genuine sweetness to Anna that keeps the character relatable even when her decisions strain credibility. Her first major lead role since The Little Mermaid shows she’s got the presence to carry a film. The issue isn’t her performance, it’s that Anna feels thinly written. The grief over her mother, her complicated relationship with cooking, her tendency to avoid honesty when honesty would clearly serve her better: these threads are present, but none of them are developed with much care. She’s more of a stand-in for the audience’s fantasy than a fully drawn character.
The film is at its most entertaining when it leans into its own ridiculousness. There’s a scene involving a Mario song, a fake wedding ceremony rehearsal, and a level of committed silliness that briefly makes everything feel alive. There’s also a running joke involving Matteo’s family being remarkably, perhaps unrealistically, forgiving of the deception unfolding in their home. Marco Calvani shows up as a chatty Tuscan cab driver who’s basically functioning as Anna’s spiritual guide, and while the character tips into caricature territory, he’s hard not to enjoy.
One thing worth noting: the film makes an interesting choice in casting two Black actors as its romantic leads in a genre that’s historically been fairly narrow about whose wish fulfillment it depicts. It doesn’t make a big production of this, which cuts both ways. There are a few wry, knowing nods between Anna and Michael about their shared experience as outsiders in a small Italian town, and they land well. But the film mostly treats their Blackness as texture rather than story, which will read differently depending on what you’re hoping the movie does with it.
Where the film struggles most is in its look and feel. Tuscany is one of the most photogenic places on earth, and the movie somehow makes it feel a bit flat. The cinematography plays it safe at every turn, the editing rarely builds any real momentum, and Matteo’s villa looks suspiciously like a luxury rental that’s been staged for a real estate listing rather than a place anyone actually lives in. For a movie that’s supposed to make you ache for an Italian summer, it doesn’t conjure quite enough of that magic.
Ryan Engle’s script follows the genre’s familiar blueprint without doing much to reinvent it. The meet-cute works, the love triangle has decent bones, but the comic scenes often fall flat, and the emotional beats don’t land with the weight they need to. You can feel the potential the story has, and you can equally feel the places where a sharper, more confident draft might have unlocked it.
You, Me & Tuscany is a perfectly pleasant way to spend two hours if you’re in the mood for something light and pretty. It’s got two leads worth rooting for, a few genuinely fun scenes, and the kind of breezy good-natured energy that makes you forgive a lot of its shortcomings. It’s just not the transportive, utterly charming rom-com it could’ve been with a tighter script and a director willing to take a few more visual risks. If you’re going to Italy in the movies, you want to feel it. This one mostly just shows it to you.
Screen Rated 
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