What Happens Later review – Meg Ryan’s airport romcom is an airplane movie

There’s an impressive level of confidence displayed by Meg Ryan in her second outing as director, less so for what the film itself ends up being but more for what she’s trying to emulate. The star of When Harry Met Sally making a talky two-hander romcom, dedicated to that film’s screenwriter, Nora Ephron, demands an immediate comparison to one of the greatest examples of the genre ever made. But What Happens Later, AKA When Meg Met David Duchovny, is set up for an almighty fall, struggling to even deserve comparison to the star’s less-lauded romcoms.

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Ryan became intimately associated with the genre for so many years because she was such an endless source of warmth and charisma, boasting a magic, ineffable charm that only a handful of other actors have ever truly had (Hepburn? Roberts? McAdams? Blunt?). The great romcom renaissance of recent years – which in fact has not been that great on closer examination – hasn’t given us many, if any, true successors, and so even if her big return to not just the genre but acting in general isn’t all that memorable, it’s a simple pleasure to see her briefly back in this mode. She and Duchovny, like Julia Roberts and George Clooney in last year’s Ticket to Paradise, make it all look so much easier than their younger, streaming pairings have, and the film remains low-stakes watchable solely because of their combined electricity.

As another, perhaps unfortunate, callback to When Harry Met Sally, the film begins with the pair reuniting in an airport. This time, though, the gap has been far longer, 25 years, exes bumping into one another after a messy breakup, at a regional airport that’s in the middle of a snowstorm. They are forced together by fate, a theme that’s a little too tweely reinforced by some cutesy magical flourishes, and wait out the bad weather together, reliving the highs and lows of their relationship.

It’s a film based on Steven Dietz’s 2008 play and perhaps would have made more sense on stage with Ryan’s strange insistence that no other person features other than in the far background, making it feel less intimate and more eerie. The airport is so underpopulated and the two so isolated that one half expects a supernatural twist to arrive. Did they die years earlier? Is this purgatory? Are we stuck there too? But the plot, if it can be generously termed as such, instead trundles from quippy argument to maudlin monologue and back again, in ways we’re never surprised by. When their back-and-forth reaches darker, messier territory, our ears prick up and the two are able to easily sell a long, lived-in history, two people who are able to quickly tap into a familiar dynamic, for better or worse.

But when your 105-minute film is based entirely on one elongated conversation between two characters, even if the two leads are more then capable, your dialogue has to be strong or surprising enough to demand our attention alone. There are flashes, especially when the pair revert to grinchy elders bemoaning modernity, but by the last act what might have felt fresh initially starts to grow musty, and we feel as stuck as they are, a repetitive push and pull dampening our investment in the will or the won’t they of it all.

Ryan’s return to the romcom might remind us of her rare skillset within the genre but it also makes us crave more, the answer to What Happens Later being ultimately: not that much.

• What Happens Later is now out in US cinemas and in the UK soon