‘In Love All Over Again’ Review: Love and Film Will Always Go Together

Love is in the air this Valentine’s eve, and Netflix knows that it needs to satisfy the quench for romance on the streaming service. So, expect many shows and movies dealing with the subject this week. In Love All Over Again is one of those shows. Coming directly from Spain, the show focuses on love and its depiction in cinema. Most of us will get our first ideas about love and how relationships should be from movies or TV shows, so it is a very interesting subject to explore.

In Love All Over Again is a Netflix TV series created by Carlos Montero, so for those in the audience who are fans of Elite, this should be right up their alley. The series stars Georgina Amoros, Franco Masini, Albert Salazar, Carlos Gonzalez, and Roser Vilajosana. The series tells the love story of Irene and Julio. Irene wants to be a film director, and Julio wants to be a lawyer, but when they meet, their life journeys will take them to places they never imagine.

The series is very much in line with any romantic comedy you have ever seen. The thing that makes this show stand out, but not really, is the fact that these two people love each other, but they end up not getting together for some reason. And so, Irene and Julio will love and hate each other countless times until the end. The show intends that you will want to see if they end up as a couple, for they are just meant to be eternal lovers and nothing more. It is a setup that has been done many times before, yet it works.

Love is one of the big themes in fiction. You can argue that every single thing we do is done in the name of love and sometimes hate, but love, most of all, is something we all want to experience. So movies and TV shows depicting these stories help us fill those holes in real life. Is it sad? Sure. Most people would love to experience love first-hand, but many will never experience it. At least, thanks to movies and shows just like this one, we can experience it vicariously.

The series feels very much like a stretched-out version of One Day, the film with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. That film is a classic of the genre and pulls off this concept in almost a perfect fashion. It is also quite sad, but even when the characters are having a bad time, you can definitely feel like they belong together; they are just too dumb to see it. In Love All Over Again tries to achieve the same with its characters, but both the actors and the way they are written make you think the opposite.

As the series progresses, the times when they fall out of love with each other start becoming more and more intense, and because we are talking about an 8-hour series, the repetition of the arguments becomes tiresome. At some point, you might definitely stop caring about what is happening with the characters. You don’t want them to be together or anything else. It is a weird sensation, and it feels like something is missing. The actors do have chemistry between them, but their characters definitely don’t feel like they should be together.

So, without this incentive to expect these people to get together, the series becomes a bit stale. The story also feels stretched out because the series starts spending time with the characters in moments that are outside their interactions. These plotlines are never as interesting as when the characters are together. They feel a bit like filler, and that is a shame. The fault is in the script because it couldn’t find a way to make these stories interesting enough so they could stand by themselves or at least next to the main storyline.

Amoros serves as a good protagonist, but only when the story requires her to be passive and more of a witness to other things. Her reactions are quite good. However, when she needs to become more of a power figure and someone who is active in the story, she is not that convincing. Masini fares better in both aspects. The acting will not be the strongest element in this show. You are here because you want to feel the feelings, but it becomes hard to do when you don’t believe that these two could be in a relationship.

In the end, In Love All Over Again serves very well as a show that knows its target audience and will deliver exactly what those people expect from it. If you are looking for a lot of teen drama mixed with some commentary on how the film depicts relationships, but not too much, then this is the show for you. The actors are doing a solid job, but the script lets them down as the situations they are put in are not really that interesting, and the relationship that is written for them is not convincing enough.

SCORE: 6/10