Raine Allen-Miller’s feature debut, Rye Lane, is set primarily in and around the titular South London street, whose distinctively vibrant atmosphere combines a traditional multiethnic working-class culture with the thriving creative scene that’s developed over the past decade or so. Taking place over the course of one eventful day, it follows the budding romance between introverted Dom (David Jonsson) and carefree Yas (Vivian Oparah), a pair of twentysomethings who are each recovering from particularly painful breakups.
After their awkward first encounter inside an art gallery’s restroom, Dom and Yas take a whistle-stop tour of the local area, chatting casually and growing closer as each helps the other deal with lingering bits of unfinished business from their recently ended relationships. But while Rye Lane clearly draws inspiration from—and pays a kind of homage to—its location, its insistence on flitting around and taking in as much of it as possible can often run counter to its intentions, making it feel more like a backdrop to the action than a living, breathing place.
Throughout Rye Lane, Allen-Miller also deploys a vivid color palette and an array of quick edits, unconventional camerawork, and other ostentatious visual flourishes, particularly when Dom and Yas narrate their backstories across a series of imaginative flashback sequences. These devices might do a good job of enlivening what’s a relatively straightforward boy-meets-girl story, but they can’t help but add to the film’s rootlessness, detracting further from any sense of reality that might have allowed us to invest in the characters.
Oparah and Jansson make for a charming pair of leads, so it’s a shame that Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia’s flat, by-numbers screenplay doesn’t give their characters many more facets beyond basic likeability. Across the film’s brief runtime, much of their conversation takes the form of post-mortems for their recent relationships, and their emotional contours are sketched in only the broadest of strokes, with a few over-specific details—such as Dom’s ex-girlfriend (Karene Peter) being very picky about her cinema snacks and Yas’s ex-boyfriend (Malcolm Atobrah) never waving at river boats and dismissing A Tribe Called Quest—shoehorned in awkwardly.
The majority of the supporting players, like Benjamin Sarprong-Broni as Dom’s best friend, are effectively keyed into Rye Lane’s exuberant spirit and zany tone, and the film’s playful sendups of the pretensions of the art world are a reliable source of laughs, with the breakneck pace and anecdotal structure often making the film resemble something closer to a single-camera sitcom or a sketch show. But as the story progresses in a way that’s almost entirely frictionless, its key emotional beats, such as an endearing and cathartic karaoke duet, feel a little unearned.
Despite its efforts to situate itself in a proud London rom-com lineage, which extend to one brief and wholly unexpected cameo from an iconic Richard Curtis mainstay, Rye Lane’s antic energy and caricatured portrait of England’s capital city fail to make its central romance truly resonate. A few scenes where its lovelorn protagonists are afforded the time to simply be present in each other’s company suggest a potentially more affecting story, but it’s only ever poking out sheepishly from behind the film’s impossibly cartoonish exterior.
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