Film review: Rye Lane is here to reclaim the rom-com as relevant genre that’s been phoned in for too long

Rye Lane opened in limited cinemas before being plopped onto Disney+ in record time, where I hope it gets passed around fans of genuinely not shit rom-coms. They do exist, y’know – the fans and the films, despite the best efforts of Netflix Originals and those daytime Christmas movies that didn’t exist three years ago; the ones that are on Channel 5 and Christmas 24, and are American but set in a fictional European kingdom – usually called something like ‘Belgradia’ – where the princess is stranded because of I don’t know, and she bumps into (quite literally) a widowed father who looks like a piece of wood, with a horrible seven-year-old who just wants a mum… and so on. You know the story without seeing any of them, which, to an extent, is something you can level at all romantic comedies, but even the bad ones used to try.

If you’re thinking, “no they didn’t”, Rye Lane is almost certainly not for you. It is, after all, 100% a romantic comedy, playing the romantic comedy game, albeit in a decidedly modern setting of young Black Peckham rather than early-30s west London, where blokes stutter women into bed, and where nobody is Black. That is, after all, what people mean when they label a rom-com “very British” – an imagined London where every day is the boat race.

Raine Allen-Miller’s feature debut takes its stylistic cues from Peep Show more than it does Richard Curtis, with plenty of POV close ups and such a liberal use of a fisheye lens that it does get a bit much at times. The story is a classic– of a heartbroken A. (Dom) meeting by chance an overly confident B. (Yas), who is probably heartbroken too, but is dealing with it by pestering A. for the remainder of the day, exploring where their obvious connection might lead to.

Because Britain isn’t all posh guys tripping over walls to the sound of Texas, the lead characters of Rye Lane eat spicy pork in Brixton Village, break up over dick pics, duet Salt-N-Peppa’s ‘Shoop’ at karaoke and fall in love to a soundtrack from free-pop producer Kwes, with a helping hand from Tirzah.

As refreshing and overdue as the representation of Black communities in British romantic comedies is though, it wouldn’t mean much if Rye Lane wasn’t so genuinely funny. Not just rom-com funny; funny funny. And, of course, romantic, although that’s never a given. The story is true to the genre, with a frustratingly hurried finale, to be honest, but the connection between Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) can’t be bettered, as Rye Lane proves that love stories are timeless, but they need work to remain relevant.