Editor’s Note: This review originally ran with our coverage of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, but we are reposting it with the film’s recent wider release. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival, and check out our full archives of past editions.
Forgive me for going Indiewire here, but what would you get if the BBC hired early Spike Lee (think She’s Gotta Have It, etc.) to direct a modern update of Richard Lester’s The Knack (and How to Get It) and David LaChapelle — at the height of his powers in the mid-aughts, of course — was employed as cinematographer? Well, it’d probably be something like Raine Allen Miller’s often delightful and occasionally exasperating Rye Lane, a stylish and witty romantic comedy about a chance encounter between two misfits in a ladies’ room and their misadventures around South London over the course of a fateful day. It’s got the exasperatingly English energy of an ITV comedy and oodles of Brixton style to spare, but once the film finishes impressing you with its fish-eye lenses and aggressively quirky rendering of its setting, it transforms into something realer-than-real, with its broad sweetness growing more affable even as it hits more familiar notes.
Who hasn’t spent an afternoon crying their eyes out in a bathroom over a broken heart? Well, if you’re Chad Thundercock, who’s only ever broken hearts like he broke school scoring records on the pitch, you probably won’t relate too much to Dom (David Jonsson), a middle-class accountant whose girlfriend left him for his meathead best friend. But in his teary-eyed confusion — he’s minutes away from meeting up with the pair of them for the first time since the break-up a few months ago (at a Brazillian steakhouse, no less) — he’s wound up in the ladies’ room at a friend’s gallery showing. In the next stall, another lonely-hearted goofball named Yas (Vivian Oparah) settles in to do her business and hears the whimpers and sobs coming from the person next to her. Despite the situation — and once everybody’s washed their hands and made their way back into the gallery, which is adorned with closeups of NHS-certified smiles — Yas follows Dom on his walk over to the steakhouse, hearing his sad story and empathizing along with the dude. It looks like this brief interaction will be all the time they’ll get to spend with each other, at least until the headstrong girl busts in on the meet-up, presents herself as Dom’s new girlfriend, and absolutely unloads on the pair sitting across from them.
Dom’s ecstatic that someone came to his defense and, importantly, said all the things he never could, and the two begin a trek across South London where they talk about anything and everything, trying too-spicy burritos and downing vod-crans and bitters at the pub. It’s at that point that Yas reveals she needs Dom’s help with something of her own: She got out of a shitty relationship with a militant artist a few months ago, but left her copy of The Low End Theory at his apartment (with Tribe being a main focal point of the break up), and she needs to find a way into the place in order to recover it. Dom offers to buy her a new copy as a thanks for her help, but… she wants that one. It is hers, after all. And so the pair continue their adventures, performing incredibly awkward karaoke, attending goofy parties with her ex’s moms in attendance, and riding hot scooters around London, until Yas is forced to reveal some pretty personal details that she’s concealed from Dom the whole time. Will the relationship continue beyond the night? Will Yas get her record back? Does the guy serving up burritos to them look familiar to anyone else? All of these questions, and more, are answered in perfectly charming fashion.
If anything is truly wrong with Rye Lane, it’s just how intense the aesthetic is at times, with the earliest moments seeking to shock-and-awe you with just how skilled Miller and her crew are at making cool shit — there’s a jokey quip about Wes Anderson here, which is honestly one of the operative comparisons I’d make in a visual sense though certainly not in a thematic one — and it can be somewhat exasperating. But by the time Miller keys in on to the emotional cores of her characters, the stylistics only enhance the sweetness as the light fades and the bright city lights slowly start to turn on. It’s got a whipfire and often cracklingly-smart script, full of big belly laughs and winsome smiles, with an un-patronizing kindness embedded in its core. Even if you can’t totally buy some of the circumstances (and let’s be real, screwball comedies aren’t necessarily known for their realism), the characters are so charmingly rendered that it’s easy to love them, with Oparah and Jonsson being impossibly charismatic and relatable in their wants and needs. It’s a rare occurance for me to roll my eyes pretty heavily at a movie’s start and find myself rooting for its protagonists to make it together by its end, but Rye Lane is such a film — the kind of romantic comedy one doesn’t necessarily expect for someone to make anymore. But, as Miller goes out of her way to prove, sometimes you should expect the unexpected.