You may think you know what a Meg Ryan rom-com is going to look like. You might even think you’ve got her latest one—What Happens Later (in theaters Nov. 3), which also happens to be her first role in almost a decade—pegged from half an hour into its run. The film, about torrid ex-lovers stranded in the same regional airport on Leap Day, has an air of surreality to it. It’s so small, efficient, and hyper-focused on the dynamic between its two stars that one can’t help but wonder if something truly catastrophic has happened outside of the floor-to-ceiling picture windows of this provincial terminal. “Maybe this isn’t a Meg Ryan rom-com after all,” you’ll say. “Maybe it’s a Meg Ryan dystopian thriller.”
But even that guess would be incorrect. What Happens Later has far fewer twists than its dreamlike atmosphere purports, though it happily teases its audience until its final moments. For all of its build-up, the movie ultimately deflates with a disappointing squeal, like a half-blown-up balloon that someone abandoned because finishing the process felt like too much work. While it’s not a complete and total dud—there is romance, there is comedy, and there is electric chemistry between Ryan and her equally game co-star David Duchovny—What Happens Later tries to do too much with too little, devolving into a saccharine misfire that not even a genre legend can hold up.
We’re led to believe from the film’s opening moments that, although these characters are completely different, they’re ultimately meant for each other. This is conveyed bluntly by two CGI snowflakes—famously a magical weather element of which no two are the same—tapping into one another in the skies outside that aforementioned, unnamed regional airport. It’s corny, but we’ve come for corny, and we’d prefer it served on a platter rather than have portions of it siphoned to us in incremental bits. It’s just unfortunate that, like all delicious things, it’s easy to fill up on corny without realizing it, until we’ve been so overserved that there’s nothing left to do but sigh and wait for the glutted feeling to pass.
