REVIEW: ‘Squared Love All Over Again’ Is Barely A Rom-Com

It can’t be easy to make a sequel to a rom-com. If every romantic comedy ends in either the couple getting together or the main character realizing they should absolutely never be with them, then to follow up that story with another one means having to either fall in love with somebody new or fall in love with the same person a second time. Not impossible, but there’s a reason there aren’t exactly big rom-com franchises out there. Squared Love All Over Again, a Netflix Original Polish-language rom-com, falls deep, deep into this predicament.

Where the first iteration of this story, Squared Love, had a nice, round, even creative story about Monika (Adrianna Chlebicka) and Stefan (Mateusz Banasiuk) falling in love while weaving in and out of their model alter-egos, Squared Love All Over Again is barely even a rom-com. This time around, the two promise to leave modeling and television behind, only for Monika to get sucked into an offer she can’t refuse, hosting a children’s television talent show with the reprehensible Rafal (Mikolaj Roznerski), a “journalist” best known for making people miserable and embarrassed on TV. But of course, Rafal remains a terrible person as he and his assistant take advantage of her love for her students while plotting to get Monika to fall in love with him to, I don’t know, boost the ratings, or torture Stefan, or something.

I hate movies where the entire plot is based on people just not communicating. I say it basically once a week while reviewing Netflix content at this point. But this is so much worse than that. Because it’s not only a movie about two fully grown adults who can barely muster up the maturity to just talk to each other about how they feel, but it’s barely even about their romance at all. With Rafal serving as the movie’s interloper, you barely even get Monika and Stefan on-screen together. Any and all chemistry I felt watching them fall in love basically evaporated through my constantly being annoyed by Rafal’s existence and the couple’ aforementioned communicative immaturity.

It’s frustrating because on its own, a story about a popular and successful school teacher who loses herself trying to do good by her students would make for a perfectly fine movie. But instead, because this is trying to be a rom-com, the real focus winds up on Rafal and Monika, who I never for a second believe are going to get together or even come close to it. Which is good, because this movie couldn’t handle an actual infidelity plotline on top of everything else making it hard to get through. Rafal is a jerk, Monkia knows this from the start, and they have no chemistry whatsoever. While he’s a similar character to what Stefan was like in the first movie at first, the difference is that Rafal has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, while Stefan is just a sweet guy underneath his trying too hard to be successful. It’s not fun watching Rafal at all.

Somewhat fortunately for Stefan, he at least has his own plot throughout the movie too. His ex-girlfriend (long story, just watch the first movie) blackballs him from the industry and he has to find himself in a world where he’s not rich, not famous, and not successful. Again, this could have been a whole movie on its own. His struggle to find a purpose in life and new line of work alongside his brother, his niece, and Monika’s father (Miroslaw Baka) is endearing. Only, it doesn’t stick any kind of landing at all. All of the dangling threads of possible futures for the character are left unfulfilled by the movie’s honestly undeserved happy ending.

Monika’s father is actually the character with the most complete and most worthwhile arc in the whole movie. His wife died years ago and he’s a mechanic who’s finding himself bored of the job and bored with life altogether. I do really enjoy his scenes with Stefan, they feel really father-son in a way that he gets almost absolutely none of from his actual daughter, save for two fine scenes. While that relationship doesn’t culminate in anything meaningful, he does run into an old customer whose beat-up old car isn’t the only thing he’s interested in spending some time with. I like this side plot the most of anything in the movie and am only chagrined by the fact that Monika has virtually nothing to do with it besides one brief conversation giving him her approval to pursue it.

Squared Love All Over Again can hardly qualify as a rom-com. It’s barely about a romance. It spends its entire runtime keeping its main characters apart for the sake of a terrible interloping plot on one hand and an unfulfilled finding oneself plot on the other. There are some decent elements to the movie, and a few characters with nice moments. But on the whole, just hardly worth your time.

Squared Love All Over Again is streaming now on Netflix.

Jason Flatt

Jason is the Sr. Editor at But Why Tho? and producer of the But Why Tho? Podcast. He’s usually writing about foreign films, Jewish media, and summer camp.