A woman, pretending to be someone she’s not, infiltrates an innocent family and wreaks havoc, gaslighting her way through one scenario after another to find love.
I know what you’re thinking: That’s the plot of Orphan, the 2009 smash hit horror movie about—spoiler alert for a 16-year-old film—an adult woman disguising herself as a child to get adopted, even though she’s actually trying to seduce the father and kill the rest of the family.
And while it is an accurate way to describe Orphan, it’s also the concept behind You, Me & Tuscany, the most twisted, diabolical romantic comedy I’ve seen in years.
Kat Coiro’s (Marry Me) film follows Anna (Halle Bailey) as she embarks on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy for romance and food. Well, that’s what the movie suggests it’s about, but it’s infinitely creepier than it suggests.
When the film begins, Anna is living it up in New York City. She struts through the street in a glamorous outfit; people stop and stare. Anna goes to her gorgeous apartment, taking a beat to admire her massive walk-in closet. She truly has it all, and the world is her oyster.
That illusion shatters upon discovering that Anna is a house-sitter, and the woman who owns the apartment (a fun cameo by Nia Vardalos) is horrified to see Anna wearing her clothes. But Anna is also wearing her lingerie. Responding to the disgust of the rich lady, Anna responds plainly, “I was going to wash them,” sounding like she’s come straight out of Dressed to Kill.
Look. I think a lot of people are fine with sharing their clothes. But I don’t know a single person on Earth who wouldn’t be horrified if someone they knew—let alone a stranger!—wore their underwear without asking. It’s a genuine violation, and Anna’s complete lack of empathy for the woman’s feelings is the first overwhelmingly large red flag that she is, indeed, a psychopath.
Later, at a hotel bar in NYC, Anna meets Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor). Matteo is intrigued because Anna orders her fries with a side of honey. You see, Anna had dreams of being a chef, and her getting fries with a quirky, unconventional side apparently means she has some sort of untapped genius.
Anyway, Matteo makes a vague suggestion that she should visit Italy, and references his empty family villa—so lo and behold, Anna takes that as a sign to fly across the world without a dollar to her name (apparently she has maxed out all her credit cards, so who knows what she did to afford the flight), and sneak into the mans family home for a dream vacation.
Staggering red flag number two!
The next morning, Matteo’s mother and grandmother enter this supposedly empty villa. They’re shocked to find Anna there, but while questioning her, they discover she’s wearing an engagement ring that’s been in their family for generations. What they don’t know is that Anna found it moments prior in a drawer, and put it on (red flag number three!). When they question her, Anna reveals that she is actually Matteo’s fiancée. In case you lost count, that’s red flag number four, and it’s at least as big as wearing someone else’s underwear.
There are plenty of romantic comedies that have queasy premises. In While You Were Sleeping, Lucy convinced the family of a man in a coma that she was his fiancée. In Overboard, a man turns an amnesiac woman into his wife, making her a servant. But those movies, and others like them, recognize that what their characters’ actions are troubling and have consequences, even if they’re wrapped up romantically by the end.
You, Me & Tuscany makes no such attempt to reckon with Anna’s behavior. Instead, it smothers everything in tacky sentimentality and hopes that if it shoves enough images of nice food and the Italian countryside, you’ll be charmed by the gaslighting, gatekeeping, and all-around girlbossing on display.
From here, Anna continues to gleefully manipulate this extremely generic and wildly stereotypical family into thinking that she’s about to be part of their world. The film makes lazy and slight attempts to justify Anna’s behavior: She’s lost her mother and has no family of her own, so somehow that means it’s fine to gaslight her way through Tuscany.
What’s especially creepy is the way Anna seems to love playing along with it. When two young girls giddily ask if they can be flower girls at a wedding (that Anna knows will never happen), she agrees wholeheartedly, plunging deeper into a labyrinth of lies she seems very happy about.
That’s to say nothing of her falling in love with Matteo’s cousin-brother (it’s a whole thing), Michael (Regé-Jean Page), even though she’s pretending to be engaged to Matteo, who’s still in America and has no idea any of this is happening.
Both Bailey and Page have been enjoyable elsewhere, but there’s no chemistry between them whatsoever here. Maybe this is a deliberate choice made by Bailey, because psychopaths notoriously have self-centered emotional spectrums. Hey, at least somebody in You, Me & Tuscany realizes how demented all of this is!
Typically, there’s some sort of reckoning with the reveal that a big lie is at the center of everything. But when Anna’s web of lies is unraveled in the film’s limp emotional climax, it’s all brushed off seconds later with a laugh and a shrug. They’re Italian, and families lie all the time, so it’s fine! And no, I’m not being disrespectful to an entire nation—that is the film’s actual justification for why Anna’s manipulation and gaslighting is all entirely a-okay. Somehow, it’s the biggest red flag of them all.
How will Anna react? Will she poison all their Aperol Spritz cocktails, which the movie shamelessly plugs? Will she murder all of them in their sleep? And when she confesses her love to the cousin-brother whom she has no palpable connection, will she bury a hatchet in his back, while wearing his underwear?
You probably know the answer, but the fact that it feels like she could do any of these things makes You, Me & Tuscany one of the most unhinged, unthinkably bad movies of the year. You should absolutely watch it.
