Anyone But You

The Gloss and the Gravity

I miss when romantic comedies could simply exist as movies instead of carrying the burden of an entire genre’s economic future. When Will Gluck’s *Anyone But You* arrived in theaters in late 2023, people talked less about the actual film than about what it supposedly meant for the theatrical rom-com’s return from the streaming graveyard. (It made a huge amount of money, so studio executives were obviously thrilled.) But sitting there in the dark, watching two absurdly attractive people fake contempt against the sun-bleached scenery of Sydney, Australia, I couldn’t bring myself to care much about any of that industry hand-wringing. I just wanted to know whether I bought the chemistry they were trying to sell.



Gluck knows this lane well. He once turned *The Scarlet Letter* into the razor-clean high school comedy *Easy A*, and here he uses Shakespeare’s *Much Ado About Nothing* as the frame for a modern, aggressively R-rated farce. Beatrice and Benedick become Bea and Ben. There are title cards quoting Shakespeare and side characters carrying names from the original play. I’m not sure the Shakespeare angle does much beyond giving the whole thing a smart-looking wrapper, honestly. The real motor is the engineered friction between Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. They spent months on the press trail half-feeding rumors of an off-screen romance, just enough to make audiences show up and inspect the evidence for themselves.

There’s an early scene that gets at the movie’s messy rhythm better than anything else. Bea, desperate for a bathroom key in a coffee shop, goes along with Ben’s lie that she’s his wife. They spend the day together. They eat grilled cheese sandwiches. Then a chain of totally avoidable misunderstandings poisons the morning after. Not long after, they’re trapped in close quarters at a destination wedding. In one sequence that got plenty of attention, a large spider winds up inside Ben’s pants during a hike. Powell panics, strips down, and Sweeney scrambles to contain the disaster. It’s pure screwball business. Powell, who spent the past few years turning his pilot-goggles charisma from *Top Gun: Maverick* into a weapon, is better than expected at playing the punchline. His muscular frame isn’t there just to be admired; the movie keeps using it for slapstick embarrassment.



Sweeney is harder to pin down here. After the claustrophobic teenage misery of *Euphoria* and the sharper satire of *The White Lotus*, she seems genuinely happy to get some room to play lighter material. Watch what she does with a broken sink in one early scene, folding her petite frame into increasingly ridiculous positions. There’s a real physical comedian in there. But once the script asks for sincere emotional openness, she can flatten out a bit. *The Guardian*'s Benjamin Lee said the pairing felt completely hollow, writing that "centering a romcom around them is like watching a kid force two dolls to kiss". That strikes me as harsher than necessary, but I get the complaint.

At times the movie feels a little too close to a luxury resort ad. The lighting never stops glowing. Everybody wears linen. Even when these people are supposedly stranded in the Australian brush, they never seem sweaty or remotely uncomfortable. (I kept imagining the craft services table sitting just outside the frame.) Still, for all the polished artificiality, Gluck sometimes quiets the machine long enough to let his stars simply look at each other.



Whether that can carry a full hundred minutes depends on how much patience you have for beautiful idiots making bad choices. I found myself groaning at how many increasingly silly excuses the film invents to keep the fake-dating setup alive. By the time they’re shouting Natasha Bedingfield’s "Unwritten" from a rescue helicopter, the movie has given up on reality altogether. Maybe that’s the right move. It has no interest in seriousness by then. It just wants you to surrender to the bright, ridiculous fun of watching the whole thing spin.