People We Meet on Vacation (2026) – Brett Haley’s Subtle Study of Love, Timing, and Memory
People We Meet on Vacation (2026), directed by Brett Haley, confirms Haley as a filmmaker of temporal intimacy, balancing humor, restraint, and emotional observation. Haley translates Emily Henry’s novel not into a conventional romantic comedy, but into a study of timing, absence, and rhythm, where love is defined less by plot than by what is withheld, repeated, or slightly misaligned.
Locations in the film are not mere backdrops but active participants in the narrative. Haley lingers on beaches, cafés, and urban streets with a patience that allows memory and emotion to inhabit the spaces. Each vacation becomes a mini-portrait of intimacy: a hotel room catches a fleeting glance between characters, a quiet street frames Poppy’s hesitation, a shared meal becomes a choreography of gestures. The cinematography—often steady, occasionally handheld—respects the subtleties of place: the viewer feels both present and slightly outside, a witness to moments that are both ordinary and emotionally charged. Haley’s New York sequences contrast with sun-soaked vacation locales, underscoring the tension between familiarity and escape, permanence and impermanence.
Haley also introduces moments of playful performance that deepen character. The sequence in which Poppy pretends Alex is a CIA agent undercover as a dancer exemplifies this. Tom Blyth’s Alex delivers restrained, awkward movements under Haley’s patient framing, creating humor that arises naturally from character rather than spectacle. Emily Bader’s Poppy, wearing her blue wig, combines theatricality and vulnerability, reminding us that intimacy often thrives in performance and misalignment. These playful interludes are never divorced from the film’s emotional logic; they exist as interruptions that illuminate the rhythms of their relationship.
The film’s wedding scene of Alex’s friend functions as a pivotal emotional pivot. Haley shoots it with spacious compositions that capture both the crowd and the private gestures within it, allowing Poppy and Alex to exist within and slightly apart from the communal celebration. The wedding provides a formal and thematic counterpoint: while others perform expected rites of connection, Poppy and Alex navigate their own misaligned timing, the camera observing their near-misses and subtle exchanges with the same patient rigor that governs the vacation sequences.
Bader and Blyth themselves are central to Haley’s visual logic. Bader’s Poppy is kinetic, often moving laterally through frames, while Blyth’s Alex is contained, often occupying static, architectural compositions. Even when together, their cinematic rhythms are deliberately offset—an aesthetic choice that conveys the persistent tension and humor of their dynamic. Haley does not resolve their misalignment through dialogue alone; the camera itself becomes the arbiter of emotional truth.
The film’s central rupture—the event that interrupts the annual vacations—is treated as a cinematic absence, an off-screen cut that structures the narrative. When revealed, Haley resists melodrama, allowing the emotional consequences to unfold organically. Even in the closing sequences, where resolution emerges, the film prioritizes duration over spectacle, demonstrating Haley’s commitment to portraying love as accumulation, repetition, and timing rather than immediate revelation.
People We Meet on Vacation ultimately affirms Brett Haley as a filmmaker attentive to rhythm, space, and performance. Through precise use of locations, playful interludes like the dance and blue wig, and the delicate observation of social rituals such as a friend’s wedding, Haley constructs a romantic film where emotion is a product of editing, timing, and the subtle choreography of human presence.
