In People We Meet on Vacation, long-distance best friends Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth) grow closer on their annual trip despite living in different cities. But the classmates turned travel buddies, who visit a new destination every year — Canada, Barcelona, New Orleans — are strictly platonic. Until they aren’t.
Alex and Poppy first meet on an ill-fated road trip to their shared Ohio hometown after their freshman year at Boston College. The drive starts off on the wrong foot — freewheeling Poppy is an hour late, pushing their departure time to the middle of rush hour. As they chat to pass time in traffic, it’s instantly apparent that they disagree on everything (especially the appeal of saxophone and the virtues of running). After finally escaping the gridlock, they get locked out of their car while at a gas station and become stranded in the middle of nowhere, so they have to share a hotel room that night. Spending so much time together helps them break through their surface differences and realize they share a similar spirit, kicking off a friendship that brings them together for an epic trip each summer.
Author Emily Henry made sure the duo’s meet cute set the right tone for their relationship. “It’s really important that you actually see these two characters as friends,” she tells Tudum. “As true, platonic, best friends who love each other, but not in a romantic or sexual or sensual way to begin with.”
The New York Times bestselling author was inspired to write the friends-to-lovers story after rewatching the beloved ’80s rom-com When Harry Met Sally... “I wanted to try to do sort of a gender-flipped version of that in which the female lead would be the Harry character. Then our Sally character is the male lead, a true romantic,” says Henry, who based her characters’ travels on her own life experiences. “For this book, I was trying to figure out a good place for these two characters to fall in love. And it came to me that it shouldn’t just be one place; it should be a bunch of different places. So I took a lot of my favorite vacations and I pulled details from those, and I wrote this story of a vacation romance that spans 12 years.”
Directed by Brett Haley, with a cast including Molly Shannon (Saturday Night Live), Alan Ruck (Succession), Jameela Jamil (The Good Place), Lukas Gage (You, Dead Boy Detectives), Sarah Catherine Hook (First Kill, The White Lotus), and Lucien Laviscount (Emily in Paris), People We Meet on Vacation reminds us of what it’s like to find your person and fall in love. “I want to bring depth and care and heart and humor and entertainment to the rom-com genre,” says Haley. “I don’t think [rom-com] should be a dirty word. I think it should be something that’s celebrated. These films speak to people about some of the biggest themes in our lives — about love, who you really are, who you want to be, how you want to spend your life, your relationship with yourself.”
So what happens to turn these friends into lovers? Read on to find out how Alex and Poppy fall in love, where their travels take them, and what happens when they finally confess their feelings to each other.
Following their road trip home from college, the duo set off to Squamish, Canada, where they go camping and party with some strangers in the woods. Later, they take on New Orleans, pretending to be a honeymooning couple to get free drinks. But it’s a trip to romantic Tuscany with their significant others that finds Poppy and Alex thinking of one another in a new light. There, Alex gets engaged and puts an end to his and Poppy’s annual trips together. Finally, the duo reunite in Barcelona for Alex’s brother’s wedding.
Fun fact: Although Alex and Poppy’s vacations take place around the world, filming took place in just two cities. Says Haley, “The biggest challenge of the film, by far, was how to pull off Canada, Tuscany, New Orleans, Ohio, and New York City in the Barcelona area. We didn’t use that many sets. Everything you see is mostly practical.” While there’s plenty of what Haley calls “invisible trickery” to establish the exotic locales, he hopes you’ll just enjoy the adventure. “I want people to feel like, ‘Wow, they went all around the world to shoot this film,’ because that’s the way it should feel.”
While they’re vacationing in Tuscany — Alex with his on-again, off-again high school sweetheart, Sarah (Hook), and Poppy with her new photographer boyfriend, Trey (Laviscount) — Poppy begins feeling ill and wonders if she might be pregnant. She texts Alex and the two of them steal outside to discuss her situation. Alex encourages her to take a pregnancy test, and they find a small drugstore that’s open late.
When Poppy gets a negative result, she and Alex are both relieved. Now that they share this secret, the pair are full of gratitude for one another and come together in a long-anticipated almost kiss. But they quickly retreat, with Alex questioning what their relationship is and Poppy professing regret since they are best friends. Both leave the situation feeling rebuffed, and we’ll have to wait longer for the two to act on this chemistry.
The next morning, Alex and Sarah get engaged. Though Poppy hides her disappointment, she later tells Alex that she thinks he’s settling. Alex, on the other hand, says he’s compromising to get what he wants: a stable, loving relationship. He can’t go on any more vacations with Poppy.
After not having spoken to him since Tuscany, Poppy calls Alex to feel out whether she should attend his brother’s wedding in Spain. She learns that Alex and Sarah have broken up for good. Despite having a work trip that week, Poppy decides to go.
At the rehearsal dinner, Alex learns that Poppy turned down a press trip to Greece to go to the wedding. Afterward, outside her vacation rental, he asks why she came. She admits to missing him and wishing things could go back to the way they were before their kiss in Tuscany. Alex says things can’t go back, and they part ways.
But once Poppy is back in the apartment, Alex returns. They both admit their true feelings and at last share a romantic kiss in the rain before spending the night together. The next day at the wedding goes well, but as the night ends Alex asks Poppy about their plans for the future. Poppy is hesitant to figure it out, preferring to enjoy the evening together, and Alex walks away — he says that while they love each other, they wouldn’t ever work as a couple.
Thankfully, yes. Back home in New York City, Poppy realizes that her reluctance to commit has cost her the one person she’s ever truly cared about. She quits her job at a travel magazine and heads back to Alex’s house in Ohio. After literally chasing him down in dramatic fashion (this is a rom-com, after all), she confesses her feelings in the middle of a crosswalk: She was scared. She was afraid he’d think she was too much if he knew who she was outside of their annual vacations. She truly does want to be with him, even if it means changing her life.
Because whatever else changes, one element will always be familiar Poppy and Alex’s relationship: each other. Ultimately, no matter where she is in the world, Poppy feels at home with Alex. Explains Henry, “I think home really is where you feel like you can be entirely yourself, where you won’t second guess yourself. You won’t worry about being rejected in some way. I think we all deserve that.”
Alex responds to Poppy’s confession in kind, and the movie ends with scenes of them enjoying a glass of wine in their shared NYC apartment and relaxing on a beach together, on vacation (a nod to the PWMOV book cover). As the credits roll, “I want viewers to feel that sense of home,” Henry says. “I want them to be reminded that there’s no such thing as too much. As a person, you’re not too much, you’re not too little. It’s OK to be who you are. The only way to really have true love and intimacy is to let people see that full, messy version of you. That’s really scary, but I think it’s also the most rewarding, meaningful thing you can do in life.”
For Haley, the couple are a perfect pair, despite their differences. “I don’t think you want to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t challenge your worldview,” he says. “I don’t know how much fun that is, and I don’t know how much you’re going to learn about yourself. We learn about ourselves through love, and I think that’s very much at the heart of Poppy and Alex.”
People We Meet on Vacation is streaming on Netflix. And stay on the lookout for even more Emily Henry adaptations on the way.
