REVIEW: Little Love for ‘Love in the Villa’

Love in the Villa is a Netflix original romance directed and written by Mark Steven Johnson about Julie (Kat Graham), a third-grade teacher with a Romeo and Juliet fixation who takes a long-awaited solo trip to Verona after her boyfriend (Raymond Ablack) breaks up with her just before.

As a whole, romance movies are often simplistic, inexpensively made, not known for astounding acting, and rather formulaic. It’s for the sake of creating comfort. If you already know what’s going to happen, you don’t have to stress and you can just watch without even thinking about it. In a streaming age where viewers completing the movie seems to be the pinnacle of corporate interest, I suppose this is all the more essential to return on investment. None of these qualities in the average romance are inherently bad things! Cheap and simplistic comfort is totally valid and I’d be perfectly happy watching a new one every week, as Netflix is increasingly inclined towards with its wide array of romance options.

Being simple and formulaic isn’t enough though. Love in the Villa could have been a perfectly fine movie. But instead, the first half is so overstuffed with frustrating stereotypes and one of the worst enemies to lovers attempts that I was too disengaged by the time the romance hits to have enjoyed it very much.

From a gay best friend who only appears three times in the beginning to I don’t even know what end, to way over-the-top stereotypical Italian dialogue, to an always angry and uptight Black lead and a snobby British love interest, there was nothing but eye-rolling for the first full hour from me. Did most of these issues melt away in the second half? Yes, and there were even some nicer moments as it went along. But I was so turned off by all of the aggravating aspects of the first half to find the rest as enjoyable is it perhaps deserved to be.

Rather than being a lighthearted tiff between Julie and Charlie (Tom Hopper), who accidentally get double booked in the same romantic villa for the week, we just get sharp animosity between two characters drawn up to be as unlikable as possible. The only romantic spark between them for the first whole half of this much too long movie is the fact that you know it’s a romance and they’ll come around eventually. They’re not having fun feuding with each other. They’re being malicious, causing allergic reactions, calling the cops and getting arrested, and so on. It’s not cute. It’s mean and frankly crosses a few too many lines for me. They finally start to soften up eventually and sure, the movie gets less annoying from then on. But getting there is a pain and hardly worth the effort.

Love in the Villa has a singular saving grace: its soundtrack. Most of the soundtrack, when not peddling in stereotypical Italian sounds, are Italian covers of well-known American songs. Every time one started I had a fun little moment of trying to figure out what song it was, and every time I felt joy in recognizing it. I’d actually love to hear a full OST for this movie, the covers are all unique takes on the songs musically, not merely Italian translations.

Love in the Villa is festooned with stereotypes and frankly difficult to watch for the full first half. It gets less intolerable in the second half, even possessing a few good moments. It just is so soured by the awful first half that I can’t possibly recommend wasting the time getting to the better parts.

Love in the Villa is streaming now on Netflix.