Love Me Love Me

The Algorithm of Aching Hearts

Let's stay with the streaming ecosystem for a minute. Platforms like Prime Video and Netflix have industrialized a very specific kind of young adult romance. You know the formula by heart: a grieving girl in need of a reset, an elite school full of absurdly rich teenagers, the dependable honor student, and the tattooed bad boy carrying anger issues and a tragic past. *Love Me Love Me* doesn't merely borrow that formula; it clutches it for dear life. At this point, I'm not even sure director Roger Kumble is approaching these films with any trace of irony.



Kumble remains an odd Hollywood trajectory to watch. In 1999, he made *Cruel Intentions*, a movie that actually understood the mean, darkly funny undercurrents of teenage desire. Now he has settled into adapting Wattpad hits: first *After We Collided*, then *Beautiful Disaster*, and now this Italian-set take on Stefania S.'s viral novel. Here he follows June (Mia Jenkins), a British teen who moves to Milan with her artist mother after her brother dies in a drug-related incident. She lands at Saint Mary's International School, where everyone seems to have a dark secret and nobody appears to spend much time in class. Before long, June is stuck between Will (Luca Melucci), the sweet Shakespeare-quoting good guy, and his best friend James (Pepe Barroso), an arrogant underground MMA fighter.

There is an early scene that tells you exactly what kind of movie this is. June spills coffee on James by accident. Rather than react like a normal person, he grabs her arm, drags her into the boys' locker room, marches her into the showers, pulls off his shirt, and orders her to wash his clothes. It's absurd. The camera lingers over Barroso's sculpted torso while Jenkins is left balancing indignation and shaky attraction. You can almost see the Wattpad comments unspooling across the screen. Whether that lands as a bug or the whole point depends entirely on your tolerance for this flavor of adolescent fantasy.



The cast is also fighting against the film's strangest creative decision: the language. This is a movie set in Italy, with mostly Italian actors, yet nearly everyone has to speak English. The script tosses out a weak explanation about the school "encouraging" English, but the real motive is plain enough. Streaming platforms want English-language content because it travels better. The result is that the Italian cast loses its natural cadence. So many exchanges feel flattened and over-rehearsed, which is why *Film Gate Reviews* was dead on in calling it "purposely stilted acting." Melucci gets hit especially hard, saddled with awkward dialogue that drains Will of what little charisma he might have had.

Jenkins does somewhat better. She has to carry the emotional center, and she keeps trying to root June's grief in something recognizable. In the quieter scenes with her mother, her body tells the story first: shoulders slumped, eyes drifting down, a girl still moving under the weight of her brother's death. Then there is Barroso. The 29-year-old Spanish actor, who some viewers may know from *Alta Mar*, is playing an 18-year-old high school student, which barely qualifies as unusual in this corner of the genre. A former Atletico Madrid youth soccer player, he brings a heavy, guarded physicality to James. He doesn't enter a room so much as brace himself inside it. Still, the chemistry with Jenkins often feels less like genuine connection and more like something the swelling pop soundtrack is trying to bully into existence.



I've seen this move before. A love triangle that barely counts as one because the intended endgame is obvious from the start. *Love Me Love Me* works well enough as a sleek, hyper-glossy diversion, but it seldom lets its characters get truly unruly or recognizably human. They stay locked as archetypes against a gorgeous Italian backdrop. If you love this genre, it will probably hit the beats you came for. But for a movie supposedly about the reckless, overwhelming force of first love, it ends up feeling awfully cautious.