To All the Boys: Always and Forever

The Pastel Melancholy of Leaving High School Behind

Teen romantic comedies usually run on a familiar autopilot. Meet-cute, panic, misunderstanding, prom-night crisis, graduation. That’s the route. *To All the Boys: Always and Forever* follows some of those beats, sure, but Michael Fimognari gives the final chapter of Netflix’s trilogy a softer, sadder pulse. This isn’t a victory-lap ending. It’s a film about that unnerving second when you realize the future you mapped out for yourself may not be the one you actually want.

Fimognari, who also directed the second movie, leans even harder into nostalgia as visual language. Lara Jean Covey still lives inside a world of soft pinks, teal blues, and bedrooms that look arranged by a very anxious fairy tale. This time, though, the prettiness feels defensive. The movie frames so much of her life like scrapbook pages, as if she can preserve it by organizing it. The early Seoul sequence at the famous Greem Café says a lot without spelling it out. Its walls and furniture are painted to resemble a flat pen-and-ink drawing, and the effect is perfect for where Lara Jean’s head is at. She wants life to stay two-dimensional and tidy, because the looming reality of college threatens to rip open everything she thought was secure.



The conflict itself is classic. We’ve all seen some version of the high school couple getting blindsided by college plans. Peter Kavinsky has his lacrosse scholarship to Stanford. Lara Jean gets rejected. But the panic that follows isn’t only about distance. It’s about self-definition. If the life she imagined with Peter no longer fits, then who is she when she’s not arranging herself around that story?

The movie’s pivot doesn’t happen in a classroom or over an acceptance letter. It happens in New York, under neon light, during a senior trip. Lara Jean sits on a stolen pink couch in a subway car, surrounded by her friends, and Fimognari just lets us watch her. The city hums around her. She says nothing. But her eyes keep moving, taking in the mess and speed of a place that doesn’t match the curated softness she’s used to. Her posture changes almost imperceptibly. In that subway ride, she stops being mainly Peter Kavinsky’s girlfriend and starts becoming a person with her own gravity.



None of this lands without Lana Condor. She remains the franchise’s emotional center, and she’s so good at letting panic, love, guilt, and resolve pass across her face almost in the same breath. Lara Jean’s idealism never feels silly in her hands. When she finally tells Peter she truly *wants* to go to NYU—to choose a city 3,000 miles away from him—Condor makes the moment hurt. Watch her hands clamped around her bag strap, her knuckles drained of color, her voice trembling even as she stands her ground. She’s choosing her future and breaking her own heart at the same time.

Noah Centineo knows how to meet that energy from the other side. Peter is still all broad shoulders and easy charm, but Centineo lets the character’s old wound—his father’s abandonment—sit close to the surface. It complicates everything. When Peter starts pulling away, his body seems to fold inward, his shoulders curving like he’s trying to brace for someone else leaving. That little detail gives the breakup tension more weight than the genre usually manages.



*The Guardian* called the film an "enjoyable enough Netflix threequel," which isn’t unfair, exactly, but it undersells what Fimognari and writer Katie Lovejoy are doing. The problems can be flimsy. The soundtrack does occasionally push a little too hard with polished pop cues. But underneath all that frosting is a real understanding of how frightening eighteen can feel.

I don’t know that the world needs endless more movies stuffed with fake breakups and grand romantic gestures at weddings. But I do think there’s something quietly satisfying in watching a young woman realize that the central romance of her life might be the one she has with her own future. *Always and Forever* still gives Lara Jean the fairytale. It just lets her write the ending on her own terms.