‘The Last Sunrise’ Review: A Sun-Drenched Romance That Never Quite Catches Fire

Amazon has spent the last few summers turning “romance content” into a reliable seasonal product, and ‘The Last Sunrise‘ arrives right on schedule with all the expected trimmings. Mallorca sunlight, a forbidden fling, an overprotective parent, and a ticking clock on a young woman’s health form the backbone of this adaptation of Anna Todd’s 2025 novel, directed by Carlson Young.

Maia Reficco plays Oriah “Ry” Pera, a young woman whose life has been tightly managed around a serious illness, right down to the medication schedule her mother Isolde, played by Eva Longoria, refuses to let her skip. When the two travel to Mallorca, Ry meets Julián, a local played by Fernando Lindez, and starts quietly abandoning the rules that have defined her.

That premise has real potential, and for stretches the film seems to know it. Reficco plays Ry with restraint rather than melodrama, letting her illness color the performance without turning every scene into a crying jag, and there’s a believable ease to her chemistry with Lindez that carries the movie’s gentler, quieter stretches.

The trouble is that ‘The Last Sunrise’ keeps reaching for bigger swings than its foundation can support. Family secrets pile up, a subplot about a wealthy outsider threatening to buy out Julián’s family fishing business gets dropped in without much weight, and the film leans on characters explaining plot developments out loud rather than actually dramatizing them. It starts to feel less like a summer love story and more like a soap opera wearing sunscreen.

That tonal whiplash is the movie’s real problem. Under the Tuscan Sun and its imitators work because the setting feels lived in, textured, worth escaping to. Mallorca here mostly functions as postcard wallpaper behind the plot mechanics, gorgeous in isolated shots but strangely flat as a place, which undercuts a story that’s supposedly about a woman falling in love with living in the moment. When your location can’t make a case for itself, neither can the romance built on top of it.

Longoria brings a familiar, slightly campy intensity to Isolde that occasionally tips the film into unintentional comedy, and Julián himself never becomes much more than a charming vehicle for Ry’s awakening. He’s easygoing and photogenic, but the script rarely lets him exist as anything beyond a symbol of the freedom Ry is chasing, which flattens the very relationship the movie is asking us to invest in emotionally.

Where the film does earn its stripes is in the small moments, the late-night conversations, the quiet gestures of intimacy that don’t need a dramatic score swelling behind them. Reficco and Lindez are clearly talented enough to make those scenes land, and it’s frustrating that the surrounding plot keeps yanking focus away from what they do well together.

Taken as a whole, ‘The Last Sunrise’ is a pleasant enough way to spend an evening if you’re already primed for this kind of story, but it never becomes the transportive, aching summer romance it clearly wants to be. The bones are sound, the leads are appealing, and the setting is beautiful in flashes, yet the film keeps sabotaging its own sincerity with plot contrivances it hasn’t earned.

I walked away from ‘The Last Sunrise’ wishing it had trusted its two leads and its setting enough to slow down, because the moments it does trust them are the only ones that really work. It’s a film with a warm heart buried under too much unnecessary plotting, competent rather than transporting, charming in pieces without ever fully coming together. I’m landing on 6 out of 10, a movie worth a lazy Saturday but not one that lingers.

Have you streamed ‘The Last Sunrise’ yet, and did Ry and Julián’s romance win you over? Let me know in the comments if you agree with my verdict.