TL;DR: Merv has a sweet premise, an adorable dog, and two leads capable of anchoring a truly memorable holiday rom-com — but the film holds their potential hostage beneath blunt writing and overly saccharine plotting. It’s comfort food, sure, but the kind that arrives lukewarm and overexplained. Watch it for the dog; stay if you like your rom-coms predictable enough to watch while wrapping presents.
Merv
There’s a very specific moment, usually around minute 17 of any modern holiday rom-com, where I feel my soul detach from my body and hover somewhere near the ceiling. It’s not because the genre is bad — I devour these movies the way a stressed-out GIF artist devours iced coffee — but because the formula can be so aggressively safe that my brain starts buffering. Prime Video’s new rom-com Merv triggered that out-of-body phenomenon early, and often. But here’s the frustrating thing: it didn’t have to.
On paper, Merv had all the ingredients to become a sneaky December delight. A sad dog, a sadder couple, a tropical dog-owner retreat, and the inspired casting of Zooey Deschanel and Charlie Cox as ex-lovers who must co-parent a depressed golden fluffball. This is the kind of setup that should deliver dopamine hits the way Schitt’s Creek delivered Alexis saying “David.” Instead, Merv plays things so safe and spells things out so aggressively that I often felt like the movie didn’t trust me to understand basic human emotions. I love a cozy holiday watch — but I don’t need my scripts written in Crayola.
That said, let’s talk about the dog. Because if there’s one thing Merv understands, it’s that putting a lovable canine in frame automatically boosts audience goodwill by approximately 30 percent. Maybe 40 if the dog wears a sweater.
Why Merv Feels Like A Rom-Com Written With Training Wheels On
As someone who’s survived every Parent Trap riff the last three decades have churned out, I’m not opposed to a familiar setup. Estranged couple forced together again? Great. Healing their fractured past through a shared quest? Sign me up. A dog retreat where your pet can do yoga beside you? I’m already googling airfares.
But Merv isn’t content to let situations reveal character — instead, it hands both leads a chorus of side characters whose sole job is to explain to them who they are, why they’re sad, and what they should do next. It’s like watching a rom-com with permanent training wheels welded onto the frame. Every emotion is spelled out before the actors even get a chance to show it.
Charlie Cox’s Russ is introduced as an elementary school teacher whose entire personality seems to be “kind man who was dumped recently.” Zooey Deschanel’s Anna is “optometrist who suppresses feelings at Olympic levels.” These are traits, not characters, and the movie insists on reiterating them like a broken Echo Dot stuck repeating your shopping list. I genuinely love both performers — the idea of Matt Murdock trading Hell’s Kitchen for a doggy wellness retreat is charming as hell — but Merv never lets them breathe.
The Dog Is Depressed, But Honestly? Same
The catalyst for the story is simple and, admittedly, adorable: Merv the dog becomes lethargic and is diagnosed with depression brought on by his humans’ breakup. I’ve seen enough TikToks of pets mourning their owners to accept this premise without blinking. If Pixar made this movie, I’d absolutely be crying by the eight-minute mark.
But here’s where the film stumbles headfirst into a snowbank. Instead of trusting that the audience will understand the metaphor — dog sad because home broken — the script hammers the point like a seasonal Hallmark ornament ad. The vet explains the depression. The friends reiterate the depression. Russ Googles the depression. Anna explains why she’s sure it isn’t depression. Meanwhile, I’m on my couch narrating like Sir David Attenborough: “Here we observe the rom-com that refuses to let subtlety survive in the wild.”
The Florida dog-retreat setup should’ve given the movie space to quiet down, loosen up, and let its characters exist. Instead, it doubles down on all the exposition that the first act already drove into the ground. Every feeling becomes a speech. Every speech becomes a thesis. Every thesis somehow leads back to “Wow, aren’t relationships hard?”
The Uneven Writing Does Zooey Deschanel Dirty
One of Merv’s biggest structural sins is how it frames Anna. It’s rare to watch a rom-com where the narrative seems slightly annoyed with one of its own leads, but here we are. While Russ is painted as the soft, emotionally transparent ideal partner, Anna is given the archetype of “controlling, closed-off career woman who must be softened like cold butter.”
This trope is older than most Reddit AMAs, and the movie doesn’t do anything particularly fresh with it. Whenever Anna’s perspective peeks through, it’s framed as something she must apologize for. Even the mid-movie flirtations with new romantic interests are slanted: Russ’s potential partner sticks around for thematic weight; Anna’s evaporates like a side quest abandoned for lack of XP.
There’s a profound irony in a film obsessed with telling its audience exactly what to feel accidentally undermining its own heroine. When the later emotional revelations finally arrive — moments that should hit with the quiet devastation of a well-written Before Sunrise monologue — the movie instead rushes through them, tilting sympathy toward Russ as though Anna’s emotional boundaries were the only thing that broke them.
It’s a disservice not just to Deschanel, who brings a grounded warmth to her scenes, but also to the rom-com structure itself. Conflict is only fun when the film respects both sides.
Charlie Cox, On The Other Hand, Is Effortlessly Watchable
Cox has the kind of naturally gentle presence that rom-coms of the 90s would’ve built entire marketing cycles around. It’s almost funny seeing Daredevil’s stoic brooder smiling through puppy yoga. He tries — valiantly — to elevate the movie’s flatter scenes with tiny character beats that hint at the fuller person Russ could have been in a sharper script.
There are flashes of a better movie buried in these moments. A version of Merv where Russ and Anna slowly thaw toward each other through shared dog-parenting disasters, emotional misfires, and awkward resort activities that go sideways in hilarious fashion. You can practically feel Cox and Deschanel reaching for that movie. But the script keeps pushing them into a Hallmark-adjacent mold where everything must be spelled out, softened, and sweetened until it’s essentially rom-com baby food.
At 105 minutes, Merv isn’t epic, but its pacing stretches thin. Scenes run longer than their emotional weight can support, comedy beats linger, and several moments could have been trimmed to sharpen the film’s emotional arc. A good rom-com should glide — this one waddles.
Is Merv Still Watchable?
Absolutely. If you’re someone who loved Lindsay Lohan’s recent Netflix holiday rom-com output, you may find Merv perfectly cozy. It’s soft, warm, charmingly photographed, and fully committed to being inoffensive comfort food. But if you’re hoping for something that pushes the genre even slightly past autopilot, this is not the dog you’re looking for.
