I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an anodyne, predictable rom-com. I am fully baptized into the Church of Ephron: there are few autumnal traditions more pleasant and comforting to me than whiling away an afternoon to the paint-by-numbers plot beats of You've Got Mail et al (though I’ll exclude When Harry Met Sally from this umbrella, which is of course excellent but at least makes some overtures at novelty in terms of form and function.)

Netflix knows how to produce and distribute these kinds of films en masse: they are incrasingly their bread and butter, as they begin to cede more of the “prestige TV with the edges sanded down” territory to Apple TV. What separates the good versions of these films from the awful ones is how much time you enjoy spending with its world and characters that a bored team of Malibu screenwriters conjured on an otherwise uneventful afternoon — and this is Find Me Falling’s greatest sin, for outside of a somewhat winning performance from Ali Fumiko Whitney (in a very gee-shucks sort of way), every single person in this film appears miserable, as if they are resigned to their fates. Set aside the incomprehensible leaps in characterization and the quasi-sociopathy required to use a suicide cliff as a plot point: how do you spend six months in Cyprus on a Netflix budget and not at least make me jealous that I’m not in your shoes?

★