If you recently caught The Devil Wears Prada 2, you may have noticed that Andy (Anne Hathaway) begins the movie single. Despite kinda-sorta reconciling with her Boston-bound chef beau Nate (Adrian Grenier) in the first movie, and the fact that Andy has apparently spent much of the time in between movies traveling the world for work (rather than remaining rooted in New York City), she doesn’t mention Nate once over the course of the movie. That makes sense; Andy must not be particularly hung up on her boyfriend from 20 years ago and has obviously led a rich and varied life without his somewhat whiny input. Nonetheless, Nate’s unexplained but highly understandable absence might cause some audience members to wonder idly about what happened to Grenier, who was best-known for starring in Entourage. Well, it turns out his Australian-set rom-com You, Always is now streaming on Netflix. What is it? Is it worth a peek for Grenierheads? We’ve got you covered.

YOU, ALWAYS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: As we know from other romantic comedies, your “best friend” isn’t actually the person you spend the most time with, confide in, or the person who helps you wile away hours playing video games. No, your best friend is someone of the opposite sex with whom you share an unspoken years-if-not-decades-long attraction that you’ve never acted upon, until one day, some kind of ill-timed life event causes you to reconsider. That’s the kind if situation that single mom Jen (Jessica De Gouw) and also-divorced Ethan (Adrian Grenier) find themselves in, though they don’t seem to fully recognize it. (No one ever does.) They’ve known each other since high school, and both live in Far North, Queensland, where Jen works as a doctor and sometimes teams up with Ethan for Marine Search & Rescue emergencies. Jen realizes she has feelings for Ethan, which he doesn’t seem to return — so she takes up with her favorite romantice novel author Patrick (Desmond Chiam), who she meets by chance. Meanwhile, Ethan gets jealous, but also meets and becomes involved with Matilda (Yasmin Kassim). Will they both realize who they truly love before new relationships pull them in opposite directions?!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I mean… a lot of them. Always Be My Maybe? Love, Rosie? Some Kind of Wonderful? Plus One? Unfortunately for this movie, there are a lot of besties-to-maybe-lovers options.

Performance Worth Watching: Kassim is so charming as Matilda — the last-introduced and least-characterized of the four main characters — that you’re not sure why she and Ethan don’t immediately run away together.

Memorable Dialogue: Sadly, the most memorable aspect of the dialogue is the metric ton of exposition some of its early scenes stack with industrial-strength gracelessness Check out this exchange:

“You don’t have to live here!”
“It’s not every day you inherit a beach house from your dad!”
“Lucky, since your ex-wife essentially left you homeless in the states.”
“Are you implying that I’m lucky that my dad died? At least my ex-husband didn’t forget to send his daughter a birthday gift… again!”

Sex and Skin: The movie opens with a shot of a bare butt… but it’s just a patient of Jen’s. Despite brief moments of Australian earthiness, the rest of the movie’s sexual content is pretty tame, even when all four lead characters are supposed to be getting some.

Our Take: Where did You, Always come from? It has Netflix’s name in the opening credits, but doesn’t begin with the famous Netflix logo, so it was likely acquired rather than produced by the streamer. It dropped onto the service on May 1st with little fanfare, and is listed on IMDB as a 2025 release, but it has no Wikipedia page and has barely been reviewed. That bizarre from-nowhere appearance is appropriate for this particular movie, which is like a wispy composite of so many other romantic comedies with next to no interest in being funny and only slightly more interest in something resembling romance. Adrian Grenier and Jessica De Gouw are both affable enough, but the movie makes the crucial mistake in assigning them both the “blandly likable” designation, leaving no one who seems motivated to generate chemistry. (Ideally, a romantic comedy has zero blandly likable leads, but we know that’s not entirely realistic.) The most successful movies about supposedly best friends realizing an attraction to one another either make the besties look intense, perhaps unhealthily entwined, or generate an absurd amount of heat for a platonic relationship; Grenier and De Gouw do neither such thing. Their characters also have some of the feeblest problems ever conceived by a romantic comedy; they both have worthwhile, honorable, steady jobs, but Jen frets that Ethan isn’t ambitious enough (saving lives too trivial without a promotion?!), while Ethan is supposedly so wounded by his messy divorce that he’s been scared off dating since (which doesn’t really fit with the “island time” laid-back attitude that he and other characters ascribe to him). The cumulative effect is that the characters’ motivations feel like they’ve been gleaned from what other characters in similar movies might be thinking or feeling.

With colorless leads and the movie’s comedy offloaded to a few stray moments of minor-embarrassment slapstick (oh, and a side character who speaks only in song lyrics; what?!), that only leaves the aesthetic pleasures of romance to buoy You, Always. Director Christine Luby drops the ball there as well. Though the movie does offer a nice little tour of North Queensland, it’s staged with a tourism-department level of dramatic tension, and some visual touches that truly don’t belong in a feature film, like cheesy “flash” transitions between scenes rather than cuts or fades. It’s the kind of zone-out filmmaking that gives Netflix and Chill a bad name.

Our Call: It’s always kind of exciting when a movie appears on Netflix without any puffed-up hype. But this one really isn’t worth your time unless you’ve worked your way through a comprehensive history of the romantic comedy. Even then, you might want to SKIP IT.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream You, Always on Netflix