‘The Last Sunrise’ (2026) Prime Video Movie Review - A Beautiful Holiday Destination Deserves Better

There is a very specific kind of romance movie that seems to have been engineered in a laboratory: beautiful Mediterranean location, attractive strangers, family secrets, a serious medical condition, a conveniently complicated mother-daughter relationship, and enough wistful staring into the ocean to fill several Instagram feeds. The Last Sunrise has all of it. What it doesn't quite have is a convincing reason for us to care about any of it.

Based on Anna Todd's 2025 novel and directed by Carlson Young, the film stars Maia Reficco as Oriah "Ry" Pera, with Fernando Lindez as Julián and Eva Longoria as Ry's mother, Isolde. It is very clearly aiming for the glossy, emotional YA-romance territory that has become increasingly successful on streaming, and on paper the ingredients aren't bad at all. A summer in Mallorca, an unexpected romance and a young woman confronting the possibility that her health may dictate the shape of her future could have made for a genuinely affecting coming-of-age story. The problem is that the film keeps telling us that these things are meaningful rather than making them feel meaningful.

Reficco is perfectly appealing as Ry, and she gives the character enough vulnerability to make the health storyline work better than it otherwise might. Her chemistry with Lindez is also pleasant, which is fairly important when your entire movie depends on us believing that two people who have just met are suddenly willing to reorganise their emotional lives around one another. Lindez brings the necessary charm as Julián, although the character is written more as "handsome, complicated local boy" than as someone with enough personality to become genuinely memorable.

Longoria has considerably less to work with. Isolde is supposed to be more than the obligatory mother who accompanies the protagonist to paradise and inevitably has Secrets™, but the screenplay doesn't always give the relationship enough texture. There are glimpses of something more interesting in the tension between mother and daughter, particularly around Ry's illness and the decisions being made on her behalf, but the film tends to move quickly toward the next romantic beat rather than sit with those uncomfortable questions. And that is the central problem with The Last Sunrise: everything is attractive, but almost nothing has much texture.

Mallorca should be one of the easiest locations in the world to make cinematic. The film was shot across Mallorca, including locations such as Deià and Valldemossa, with additional beach footage from Menorca. Yet the scenery often feels more like an extremely expensive screensaver than a place these characters actually inhabit. That's particularly frustrating because the story is supposedly about attachment to place, living in the moment and discovering what makes a life worth holding onto. The location should therefore be part of the emotional storytelling. Instead, the film frequently photographs Mallorca as generic holiday perfection.

The romance has a similar problem. Ry and Julián are likable enough together, but their relationship develops according to the familiar rules of the genre: meet-cute, attraction, beautiful scenery, emotional disclosure, obstacle, more beautiful scenery. There are moments of genuine sweetness, but the film rarely finds anything surprising in the relationship. You can often see the next emotional beat arriving several minutes before the characters do.

The health storyline should provide the film with its emotional core. Ry's condition forces her to confront questions about risk, independence, and how much of her future she is willing to surrender to medical certainty. According to the film's synopsis, she has been offered a potentially curative surgery that carries the frightening possibility of memory loss, while her medication leaves her feeling emotionally numb. That's an excellent premise for a young-adult drama because the choice isn't simply between "safe" and "dangerous"; it's between two versions of an uncertain future. Unfortunately, the film doesn't dig into that dilemma as deeply as it could.

The same applies to the family secrets. They are clearly intended to complicate Ry's understanding of her mother and her family's history, but the revelations function more as conventional romantic-drama machinery than as genuinely destabilising discoveries. The movie keeps introducing potentially interesting material and then moving on before it can really examine it. This is where The Last Sunrise feels strangely old-fashioned. Not in a charming Under the Tuscan Sun kind of way, but in the sense that it seems to believe putting attractive people against beautiful scenery automatically creates emotional depth. It doesn't.

What saves the film from becoming entirely forgettable is that there is a sincere idea underneath all the glossy packaging: what does it mean to actually live when you know your future isn't guaranteed? Ry's illness gives the familiar "live in the moment" romance trope an actual reason to exist. The problem is that the film reaches for that idea repeatedly without finding particularly fresh ways of expressing it.

The 1-hour-46-minute runtime is probably a blessing. The movie moves quickly enough that its weaker elements don't become completely exhausting, and there is something to be said for a romance that doesn't demand an entire eight-episode season to establish that two attractive people are attracted to each other. But the speed comes at a cost. Several dramatic threads feel underdeveloped, the supporting characters rarely become more than accessories to Ry's story, and some of the supposedly major emotional turns arrive with considerably less impact than the film clearly expects.

Still, there is a certain pleasantness to it. The Last Sunrise isn't mean-spirited, cynical, or aggressively bad. It is simply much more interested in being pleasantly romantic than in being genuinely insightful. If you are looking for a glossy summer romance with Mallorca, attractive leads, and enough melodrama to justify several ocean sunsets, it delivers exactly that. If you're looking for something that will stay with you after the credits, the sunrise may be the most memorable thing about it.

The Last Sunrise has the ingredients for an affecting romantic coming-of-age drama but rarely cooks them into anything particularly distinctive. Maia Reficco and Fernando Lindez have enough chemistry to make the central romance watchable, Eva Longoria brings some welcome emotional weight, and the Mallorca locations are undeniably gorgeous. But the writing is formulaic, the family drama feels underdeveloped, and the film's potentially powerful questions about illness, choice and mortality are repeatedly softened into familiar romance-movie sentiment. It is an easy enough watch, but it confuses an attractive setting and attractive people with emotional depth far too often. The title promises a last sunrise. The movie could have used a little more daylight.

Final Score- [5.5/10]
Reviewed by - Anjali Sharma
Follow @AnjaliS54769166 on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times