The Other Zoey: A Romcom Where You Wish for an Avalanche Before the First Kiss

Zoey Miller (Josephine Langford), a smart computer major who thinks she has love all figured out, has her life turned upside down when Zach (Drew Starkey), a popular college soccer player, gets amnesia and mistakes Zoey as his girlfriend. Before she can reveal the truth, she meets Zach’s cousin, Miles (Archie Renaux), with whom she has a lot in common. Pretending to be Zach’s girlfriend, she realizes she has feelings for both of them and is forced to confront her fears to make an impossible decision.Content collapsed.

Review:

The Other Zoey is an average, slightly charming romcom that’s only memorable for Josephine Langford’s nicely acted performance. It’s comfort food streaming, charming and cliched enough to keep the viewer from switching it off.

Zoey (Langford) is an egghead, computer science major, who doesn’t believe in romantic love, just compatibility based on mutual interests. She’s even written a dating app for that. Naturally, she will be falling in love with her romcom evolutionary ideal mate, the jock, who in the only interesting twist of the movie, has layers of humanity beyond dumb, all of them good. A bit of accident induced amnesia, some character switching and confusion, a dose of misdirected polyamory shenanigans with a related cousin plays out to an annoying extent during a family ski trip.

Director Sara Zandish tries to keep it lively but the cliché heavy plot defeats her gloss. The North Carolina location adds a bit of regional flavor, but not much else. As an hour tv episode it would be fine— with the extra 30 minutes of padding, The Other Zoey is exposed for the average that it is.

Langford manages to make Zoey likable and convincing despite being neither and she does have a small amount of chemistry with Drew Starkey to make it barely work. Starkey has the disowning charm of a young Owen Wilson. Kill the one note characters, particularly the genial roommate and the amiable parents stuck in thankless moral support roles and The Other Zoey could be more than a mildly pleasing romcom.