Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of People We Meet on Vacation
2026 · Brett Haley · People We Meet on Vacation on Sightlines
Start with the dance. In a New Orleans bar under neon, Poppy and Alex throw themselves into something goofy and badly coordinated. It's the kind of thing two people only do once they've stopped performing for each other. On its own it's a stock rom-com scene. What makes it count is where the film puts it. People We Meet on Vacation keeps leaving moments like this for a present day in which the same two people can barely manage a conversation. Something broke between them, and the film won't say what yet. So you watch the dance knowing it ends badly somewhere. Knowing that is most of the pleasure.
That's the film's real design, and it comes from Brett Haley and his editor, Evan Henke, who took over Emily Henry's braided chronology whole: a present-day attempt at reconciliation cut against flashbacks spread over nine summers of trips. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two big books on how films organize time, gives us words for what that braid is doing. He also helps explain why it works for some viewers and leaves others cold.
Begin with the flashbacks. Deleuze calls a dated flashback a recollection-image. It's a former present, put back in order and labeled with its date, so it serves the story being told now. He distinguishes these sharply from films where the past swamps the present and you can no longer tell which layer you're standing in. This film is firmly the first kind, and that's a choice, not a failure. Blyth and Bader have said they used costume to anchor each period. The clothes tell you which summer you're in before anyone speaks. Production design marks each place (New Orleans, Croatia, Squamish, Barcelona, Tuscany) in the same way. Deleuze has a term for this too, the mark: an object that means something because of a habit it sets up. See this haircut, this jacket, and you know the year. The design does what a good map does. It keeps you from getting lost so you can pay attention to something else.
That something else is the gap in knowledge, and here the lens actually opens the film up. Deleuze's relation-image, which he got from Hitchcock, describes a cinema in which the viewer is a third party to the story, holding relations the characters can't see. Dramatic irony is the plain name for it. We see two friends in a past summer and also the cold present they're heading toward. The film depends on us holding both at once. We wait to find out what went wrong, and meanwhile we collect the proof that they belong together, a proof neither of them has bothered to look at. Siede at The A.V. Club found the structure "clever enough" as a way of delivering this irony, and she's right. The cuts aren't really about what happened next. They connect a summer to the present, which is why the film doesn't feel episodic.
The withheld rupture is a sort of index of lack: Deleuze's term for an ellipsis that points to a situation we haven't been shown, so that the present-day stiffness between them only makes sense once we have the missing piece. The film's engine is timing when it releases that piece.
You can see the same principle on a smaller scale. The Spool said Tom Blyth excels at "facial acting," carrying Alex's feeling in his face rather than his lines. Deleuze would call that an affection-image, a feeling registered in close-up and held back rather than turned into action. For a character built on restraint it's the right register. Alex's love can't be spoken yet, so it has to be visible before it's audible.
The Spool's complaint deserves an honest hearing, because Deleuze helps with that as well. The worry was that constant jumping between years keeps any one summer from building a solid foundation, so the relationship gets skimmed. In Deleuze's terms, this is a movement-image film. Every recollection is there to serve the action of reuniting the couple. Nothing in the past is allowed to exist for its own sake, to linger and go strange. The postcard brightness critics noticed, which one reviewer compared to a travel brochure, follows from that. When every image has a job in the plot, places become stations. Whether that's a pleasure or a loss depends on what you came for, and the critical split (78 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 50 on Metacritic) follows that question almost exactly.
The lineage makes the stakes clearer. It Happened One Night (1934) set the template of mismatched leads forced to travel together, courtship as a journey. Two for the Road (1967) is the direct structural ancestor: one couple's repeated trips cut together across years, so past and present rhyme inside a single scene. Annie Hall (1977) shuffled a relationship into associative memory and let later knowledge leak into earlier scenes. Nora Ephron supplied the rest. When Harry Met Sally... gave the friends-to-lovers story told in check-ins across years. Sleepless in Seattle showed how to score dramatic irony with familiar songs. You've Got Mail built a whole film on what one lead knows and the other doesn't. Haley's film takes from all of them. Where it falls short of them is music. Siede pointed out that the needle-drops, a Taylor Swift song among them, don't fix scenes to their years the way a decade-spanning story invites. For a director whose Hearts Beat Loud was built around songwriting, it's a strange gap.
So what did the film do to cinema? Honestly, it didn't push the art forward. It confirmed a model. Seventeen million opening-weekend views show that a pre-sold readership, a mid-sized budget and a braided timeline can bring back a genre that had seemed close to gone. Its lasting interest is formal, and it's modest. It makes clear that the friends-to-lovers story has always been a story about time. A romance between friends doesn't need a meet-cute. It needs an archive, years of evidence for us to reread.
That's the better way to watch it again. Ignore the reveal, which you already know. Watch the clothes change, and watch Alex's face in the summers before he lets himself say anything. Then go back to the neon bar in New Orleans and ask yourself when he knew.
Concepts in play
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — Henke's edit alternates a present-day reconciliation with dated flashbacks across nine summers, each serving the present-tense plot
- mark — Blyth and Bader used wardrobe changes as anchors so the audience can instantly place each flashback; Colin Wilkes's design distinguishes each vacation locale
- relation-image (the mental-image) — The dramatic-irony structure: the audience holds the happy past and the estranged present at once and tracks evidence the leads don't see; Siede calls the flashback structure a clever delivery mechanism for dramatic irony
- index-of-lack — The rupture that ended the friendship is withheld and released on a timer; the present-day estrangement points to an unseen event
- affection-image — The Spool found Blyth carrying Alex's feeling in his face rather than his lines, restraint registered but not yet discharged
- movement-image — Every flashback serves the goal of reuniting the couple; locations work as stations (the brochure-like photography critics noted) rather than spaces with lives of their own