In You, Me & Tuscany, Anna (Halle Bailey) is a broke housesitter squandering her potential. She’s a trained chef, but her career was put on the back-burner after her mother died, and now she throws herself into the temporary luxury of other people’s lives. On a fateful trip to a New York hotel bar, where her bestie Claire (Aziza Scott) has promised she can charge her phone, she meets Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), a drop-dead gorgeous Italian real estate broker. They hit it off, but while Matteo’s jetlag prevents them from having a one-night stand, the memory of his unoccupied, beyond-picturesque Tuscan villa lingers in Anna’s mind, a North Star that reanimates her love for Italian cuisine, culture, and climate.
This is where things get messy, and for the film’s purposes, exciting: There is no room available at his village when she arrives, so Anna crashes in Matteo’s villa, knowing it’s empty—and when Matteo’s agitated Italian family discovers the American squatter, she is saved by a family heirloom engagement ring that she put on after rooting through Matteo’s things. Naturally, they assume she’s Matteo’s fiance. As it seems to be the only way to avoid being arrested, Anna confirms their assumption. The rest of You, Me & Tuscany is spent adding tension to this convoluted lie—not least being the addition of Matteo’s winegrower cousin Michael (Regé-Jean Page), who resents Matteo for abandoning his family and happens to be a much better fit for Anna.
You, Me & Tuscany gets its genre fundamentals correct—this is a terrific rom-com premise, as absurd as it is titillating, loaded with conflict that promises to lead to a happy ending. But if You, Me & Tuscany gets the peppy, frivolous basics right, its brushwork is way off. The film is only truly successful if you watch it from the middle distance, where it’s easy to conclude that it resembles a good rom-com without having to diagnose its atrocious visual design, tropey plotting, and queasy comedy for what it is—a tired, flat mishandling of high-potential material.
This is Halle Bailey’s first lead role since playing Ariel in the live-action The Little Mermaid, and she brings a similar peppy enthusiasm (with far less naïveté) to Anna. From the moment she arrives on vacation, Anna is chipper and forthright, but while she’s savvy enough to save her skin with the engagement lie, she balks at the repeated opportunities to confess her deception. Anna is a well-rounded stab at a rom-com protagonist—someone who knows the value of chasing her desires but lacks the conviction and integrity to be honest with the people she’s deceived in the process. Anna is so happy with the vibes—the picturesque locale, Matteo’s eccentric and adoring family, the luxury of this new, fake life, the food—that she won’t push back against the boundaries of this too-good-to-be-true fantasy.
Enter the film’s dollop of cynicism: Michael, who gets off on the wrong foot with Anna by stealing the last sandwich from the village deli and makes up for it by showing her around the village during the prep for a big, traditional festival. Surprise, surprise, they hit it off just like Anna and Matteo did, especially after a few glasses of wine (and after he massages grape-growing soil through her fingers). When Anna and Michael are being flirty and reckless, You, Me & Tuscany is a lot of fun—there’s a patent absurdity to the body-brushes, shirt-removals, and breathy near-kisses that nimbly synthesizes both “rom” and “com.” But Page is far more suited to Michael’s snarkiness than the character’s dashing romance responsibilities—when Matteo eventually returns, Page is convincingly intense as a jealous, feuding cousin, but he’s less convincing as Anna’s sultry pursuer. He channels Black Bag far more than he does Bridgerton.
And aside from that performance miscalculation, there’s no getting around a central flaw: You, Me & Tuscany is atrociously ugly, marked by vacant compositions and clueless editing, the visual texture of a credit card commercial, and sweeping drone shots that look compressed and crummy on the big screen. You, Me & Tuscany‘s director Kat Coiro (Marry Me) brings none of the visual spark suggested by its destination: basic cinematography rules are ignored while bland hi-def images sap the real Italian locations of their lush colors.
Worse, though, is its production design; putting aside the egregious but ultimately harmless product placement, Matteo’s villa is a vapid “dream home.” The modern kitchen and boxy, trendy furniture is a dead giveaway of a classic rustic home that’s been gutted and refitted for a second life as a soulless Airbnb. This has a negative effect on Anna’s arc—the villa is meant to represent an authentic, tantalizing other life that fulfils all of her wild fantasies but, crucially, isn’t hers. Where is the flawed stonework, the sporadic and inconsistent lighting, the old-fashioned furniture and relics born from decades of life in a small town? The villa is insufficiently romantic, and its inauthenticity indicates that the film’s vision is blinkered.
You, Me & Tuscany was written by Ryan Engle, who’s responsible for the generic yet solid scripts of films like Beast, The Commuter, and Non-Stop. But the halfway-there result of You, Me & Tuscany indicates that writing a good-enough rom-com is harder than delivering a good-enough action thriller. The balance of satisfying emotion, tense but lightweight deception, and chemistry-fueled spark won’t simply gel together after assembling the right elements. You, Me & Tuscany bought the right ticket, but it’s flying to Italy on autopilot.
Director: Kat Coiro
Writer: Ryan Engle
Starring: Halle Bailey, Regé-Jean Page, Marco Calvani, Aziza Scott, Lorenzo de Moor, Isabella Ferrari
Release Date: April 10, 2026