The Last Sunrise, the latest addition to Amazon’s extensive romance catalogue, combines a titular sunrise, a summer fling fantasy, exorbitant wealth and impossibly sculpted bodies. Indifferently directed by Carlson Young, the film adapts the 2025 novel of the same name by Anna Todd, whose After series was previously adapted between 2019 and 2024.
A Familiar Formula Falls Flat
Amazon has found high returns in a particular romance category in recent years, from this summer’s Every Year After to The Summer I Turned Pretty. These stories are easily palatable, set in idyllic locations, and orbit attractive, heterosexual, wealthy couples. The narrative simplicity that once allowed for electric chemistry between leads, tailored wardrobes and irresistibly depicted locales has given way to cheap melodrama.
With improbable plot twists, family secrets and at least one across-the-face slap, The Last Sunrise is more soap opera than Under the Tuscan Sun. The soapy mood is heightened by the presence of Eva Longoria, known for her role as Gabrielle Solis in Desperate Housewives. Longoria plays Isolde Pera, mother of protagonist Oriah (Maia Reficco), a young dancer with tuberous sclerosis, a rare genetic condition causing tumors in different organs.
A Plot That Happens To Its Heroine
Oriah joins her mother on a summer trip to Mallorca, where Isolde grew up and where her company, Redwyn, plans to build a new hotel. The trip comes after Oriah suffers a seizure on stage, facing a choice between increasing her medication dosage or undergoing surgery. The pills numb her feelings, but surgery risks memory loss. She initially opts for the former, yet upon arrival in Mallorca, she quickly abandons treatment to feel every passionate moment of her summer fling with Julián Garcia (Fernando Lindez), a local fisher.
Oriah insists the pills make her numb, but no evidence supports this claim. There is little dramatic modulation in her character, and despite being the protagonist, she makes little impact on the plot—mostly, things happen to her. These events are not dramatized but described in dialogue. For instance, Redwyn’s attempt to buy the Garcia fishing docks, which would destroy a century-old business and break Julián’s heart, is meant to raise stakes. Yet the deal’s work goes unseen, and the disputed land—which Julián goes into debt with a loan shark to save—is never shown.
Lack of Visual Storytelling
For a story concerned with attachments to home, The Last Sunrise lacks texture. Mallorca is photographed like a stock image, its specificities scrubbed clean. Films like Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray, Love endure partly because their fantasy versions of Italy are rendered in minute detail. The disregard for visual storytelling, paired with a lack of interest in plot mechanics, raises the question of why the movie was made at all.
Romance has regained prominence in the cultural spotlight, with the romcom reborn as steamy television and commercial romance fiction filled with graphic detail. But as the genre returns to prominence, the human-scale simplicity that gave us Bridget Jones’s Diary has been neglected, replaced by half-baked efforts like The Last Sunrise. Its main value is to expose how indifferently streaming platforms regard their audience. The Last Sunrise is now available on Amazon Prime Video.
