REVIEW: ‘She Said Maybe’ Is The Worst Kind Of Rich People Story

Watching rich people can be fun. Opulence is attractive, and their unattainable lives are nice to dream of from time to time. When wealth is gaudy instead of glamorous, or waved in people’s faces as if the not-rich should be ashamed of their station in life, like it is in the Netflix Original German-Turkish rom-com She Said Maybe, wealth becomes annoying and uninteresting in an instant.

Directed by Ngo The Chau and Buket Alakus and written by Ipek Zübert, She Said Maybe throws you in too fast. There’s no setup. It’s Mavi (Beritan Balci)and Can (Sinan Güleç) on a cliff. He’s about to propose, it goes wrong, and suddenly they’re both on the phone with friends and family, who haven’t been properly introduced, talking about what just happened. Only, it happened so fast that you’re already left playing catch-up.

The split-screen gimmick gets old fast, as every single conversation is just a recap of what just happened. Really, the whole movie is a series of gimmicks that don’t work. After the proposal that never was, Can invites Mavi to spend ten days with him in Istanbul. Mavi has never been to Turkey, where her family is from. She doesn’t even speak the language. But when they arrive, it turns out that Mavi has a grandmother, Yadigar (Meral Perin), whom she never knew about.

She Said Maybe is overfilled with openly unpleasant people.

More than that, Mavi discovers she is the heir to an ultra-wealthy Turkish family and its business. From the moment Mavi and Can arrive, Yadigar begins scheming to break them up using a hot man named Kent (Serkan Çayoglu) while sending an agent of hers back to Germany to try and destroy Can’s family’s law practice. Kent’s motivations are never entirely clear, but no matter his intentions, no decent person intentionally tries to pry somebody away from their partner as he does.

These are all essentially openly unpleasant, malicious people. Even the family members who are meant to be fun and ease Mavi into the culture of Istanbul are poorly conceived. One of the first people she meets, her cousin Edo (Mehmet Atesci), is unbarably annoying. He’s a caricature of a gay socialite who is so over the top you can hardly wait for him to go away whenever he’s around. At least he’s basically the only decent and honest person in the whole movie.

Beritan Balci is also directed to overact, tearing sandwiches with big bites and looking constantly like a fish out of water, so as to oversell her being lost in the grandeur of Istanbul and its aristocracy. It’s hard to root for Mavi, even. She’s constantly being reduced to an uncultured young girl who is oh-so-confused about what to do and who to trust.

Can and Mavi both make incomprehensibly bad choices without ever having a real conversation about them.

When it’s so painfully obvious that Yadigar doesn’t have Mavi’s best interests at heart, and that Mavi and Cen seem perfectly happy and well-to-do together before their trip, there’s no tension in the should-she shouldn’t-she plot whatsoever.

Then there’s Güney, the most loathsome character in the movie. He’s jealous of Mavi’s sudden appearance and potential takeover of the family business. He always has a wretched scowl on his face when talking to Mavi. He goes so far as to do this disgusting sniffing of her neck while mocking her for being from a working-class family that left Turkey. He also has this odd rivalry going with Kent that reeks of toxic masculinity. It’s terribly uninteresting to watch play out.

And then, She Said Maybe manages to get even worse. Can has to go back to Germany, and Mavi gets caught by the paparazzi standing next to Kent. Can finds out, and while he doesn’t have a full-blown meltdown over it, the couple isn’t able to have a remotely adult conversation about it. When Yadigar intercedes to keep pushing Can and Mavi further apart, the contrived drama and Can’s out-of-character behavior become intolerable. It’s another instance of a boring trope dragging the movie down.

The way everyone acts in She Said Maybe is confounding and unpleasant to watch.

A rom-com does not work if you’re forced to spend half the movie resenting at least one of the romantic leads, let alone both of them. Can’s behavior is totally inexcusable and nonsensical. At least Mavi has the excuse of being swept away by her big family and their wealth.

Why is he jealous and confrontational? If he can’t trust Mavi, or at least have a reasonable conversation with her about how he’s feeling, why should audiences root for them to stay together in the long run? She Said Maybe starts to make you almost wish Mavi would just leave Can and stay in Istanbul with the way he behaves. No matter which way the movie goes, there will be no winning for the viewers in the end.

But of course, this is a romance, so there’s only one way the movie can end. And it’s a wildly undeserved conclusion. After enduring all of She Said Maybe’s bad characters and plot turns, at least it ends with one of the best Turkish pop songs to ever hit the global scene. But ultimately, She Said Maybe is a mess of a rom-com with leads you can’t root for and a cast of malicious characters you have to tolerate for little payoff.

She Said Maybe is streaming now on Netflix.