A plastic rom-com starring a C-Tier ‘Scream’ villain gerrymanders some success on streaming

In Netflix’s latest second-screener pile of slush La Dolce Villa, protagonist Eric Field asks “Anything good on Netflix?” to one of the other characters, and there has hardly been a more perfect encapsulation of the insanity of the streaming-original ecosystem.

It’s bad enough that these movies are committed to ham-fisted brand promotion, but there’s not even an ounce of genuine creative intention to balance things out. Even the word “content,” which has long epitomized those movies that have no other purpose outside of being time-consuming products, feels generous to describe the lows we’re swimming toward.

But that hasn’t stopped La Dolce Villa from swimming up. Per FlixPatrol, La Dolce Villa is the second most-watched film on the United States’ Netflix film charts at the time of writing, just falling short of that top spot courtesy of the Laura Dern-led Trial by Fire. It’s a bleak chart all around — the strongest contender is the eighth-place Sing of Illumination fame, and that’s mostly due to its surplus of earnestness rather than anything concrete.

La Dolce Villa stars Scott Foley as Eric Field, a restaurant consultant who flies to Italy to convince his daughter Olivia (Maia Reficco) to not purchase a one-euro fixer-upper home in the countryside. No sooner does he touch down he encounters the town’s beautiful mayor Francesca (Violante Placido), leading him to extend his stay in Italy just a little bit.

Some will recognize Foley for his turn as Roman Bridger, the man behind Scream 3‘s Ghostface and the only Ghostface in the whole series to have worked solo thus far. He’s due to reappear in Scream 7 in a yet-undisclosed role alongside horror legend and fellow Scream alumnus Matthew Lillard, but whether this will mark the return of Roman Bridger and Stu Macher or re-introduce the pair as entirely new characters remains to be seen.

In the wake of his departure from the film, director Christopher Landon had no bright sentiments to share of Scream 7‘s behind-the-scenes turmoil. A similar amount could be shared on the dire, dire ordeal that is La Dolce Villa.

In La Dolce Villa and movies like it plot beats occur for no other reason than making the next plot beat occur. There’s no reason for these movies to be well-acted or well-written because there’s no emotional starting point with which to measure good acting or good writing, The reason these movies exist at all is so Netflix can farm revenue off of bad viewing habits. You won’t miss anything in La Dolce Villa if you spend the movie scrolling on your phone because, by design, there literally isn’t anything to miss.