Rye Lane: a vivacious south London romcom with an eye for detail

• Reviewed from the 2023 Sundance Film Festival

Not many romcoms begin with a meet-cute in a Peckham art-gallery toilet, but first-time feature director Raine Allen-Miller has a certain eye for romance. Having shown us, via overhead pan, a series of lively cubicles – including one filled with fighting teens – the director introduces us to weeping, bereft twentysomething Dom (David Jonsson), who, via social media, has found his ex-girlfriend Gia decorating her flat with new boyfriend Eric – Dom’s best friend. Dom’s anguish is so loud that spunky Yas (Vivian Oparah) yells from an adjacent WC to offer support. After a tentative chat, the pair meet properly in the gallery space where their mutual friend is exhibiting, before stepping into the good-natured chaos of Rye Lane – the eponymous street at the heart of Peckham, and base for Dom and Yas’s blossoming romance.

Peckham, despite more than two decades of the gentrification that has affected so many of London’s neighbourhoods, still has a thriving Black community, a wide mix of nationalities living cheek by jowl, and a street-level vibrancy. To the credit of Allen-Miller and her cast and crew, this film, shot on location, captures this sizzling energy, and the buzz of a nearby locale just as gentrified as Peckham: Brixton, where we see Yas and Dom spend much of their time.

Yas, played with appealing, quick-witted vitality by Oparah, is emblematic of the area – she’s funny, fast and full of ideas. A fledgling costume designer garbed in striking colours of the kind generally seen up and down Rye Lane, she bulldozes her way into the film’s most laugh-out-loud scene, delivering a demolition of Eric and Gia in a restaurant where Dom has arranged to meet them.

The film acutely taps into recognisable break-up sadness and petty arguments – a plotline about retrieving a vinyl copy of A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory from an ex’s flat is particularly prominent – while the dialogue, accents and characterisation are, to this south Londoner, recognisably authentic, the result of Allen-Miller’s careful work with her cast as well as Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia’s sparky script. A brief nod to Richard Curtis sees Colin Firth serve our lovestruck duo with a burrito from a café called Love Guac’tually, though elsewhere another Richard comes just as readily to mind: the casual conversational honesty of Yas and Dom’s walks along the south London streets evoke Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995).

Occasionally one questions character motivations and the believability of certain story elements, but the journey is a cheerful one, and, at 82 minutes, doesn’t outstay its welcome. A confident, engaging debut.

► Rye Lane is in UK cinemas from 17 March.