TL;DR: Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy is a snowbound romance that looks warm and inviting but melts the moment you touch it. Despite charming leads and a few cute moments, it’s a formulaic return to Perry’s most sentimental habits — a Hallmark knockoff without the wink.
Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy
Tyler Perry is an empire disguised as a filmmaker — a guy who can pivot from slapstick Madea chaos to earnest melodrama to surprisingly tender period pieces, sometimes all in the same movie. That tonal whiplash is part of his brand. You watch a Perry film not because it’s going to make sense, but because you know something wild will happen between the gospel number and the crying monologue.
So when Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy landed on Prime Video, I strapped in expecting either emotional fireworks or at least a few meme-worthy moments. What I got instead was the cinematic equivalent of a lukewarm cup of cocoa — comforting for a sip or two, then oddly artificial once the whipped cream dissolves.
Meet Joy (Shannon Thornton), an ambitious New York fashion designer whose talent is as undeniable as her bad taste in men. She’s the type who’ll design a killer gown but still date a guy who calls her “bro.” After being repeatedly steamrolled at work by her boss (Eric Stanton Betts, playing the kind of industry jerk who probably owns NFT sneakers), she follows her almost-boyfriend Colton (Aaron O’Connell) to Colorado. Spoiler: he’s engaged — just not to her.
Cue the blizzard. Joy’s car skids off a frozen lake, she crashes through the ice, and then — somehow — she wakes up dry, cozy, and saved by a guy named Ridge (Tosin Morohunfola). Ridge looks like someone AI-generated after typing “Black lumberjack thirst trap.” Beard? Check. Flannel? Check. Voice deep enough to make Morgan Freeman jealous? Double check.
He’s living off the grid for mysterious, Perry-flavored reasons involving grief, isolation, and mom issues (of course his late mother’s name was also Joy). And because the snowstorm locks them together for a week, they’re forced into the world’s most awkwardly wholesome game of “Will They, Won’t They, But Obviously They Will.”
Perry clearly wants Finding Joy to be his Hallmark moment — a simple, snow-globe romance filled with cozy sweaters, soulful gazes, and a moral lesson about rediscovering yourself. And sure, that could work. The problem is, everything here feels like it was generated from a “Christmas Movie Template” in Final Draft.
Every emotional beat is telegraphed three miles away. Joy’s low self-esteem? Solved by Ridge’s deep, affirming stare. Ridge’s emotional distance? Fixed by a hug and a line about “learning to love again.” There’s even a hot-tub-level scene where she gets stuck on a frozen toilet seat — because Perry never met a gag too broad to wedge into a love story.
The two actors do what they can. Thornton radiates charm, and Morohunfola sells the stoic woodsman thing like he’s auditioning for The Bachelor: Homestead Edition. But the script doesn’t give them much to chew on. Perry’s direction feels like he’s more interested in the lighting than the dialogue, bathing everything in that soft golden glow that screams “This is love, dammit!”
To be fair, Perry’s been stretching himself lately. A Jazzman’s Blues proved he could build complex characters, while The Six Triple Eight suggested a filmmaker learning how to trust subtlety. Finding Joy, though, feels like a regression — an autopilot project that mistakes sincerity for storytelling.
There’s no sense of surprise, no tonal whiplash, not even the wild melodramatic spikes that make Perry’s films uniquely chaotic fun. Instead, everything here is safe. Predictable. Calorie-free cinema for people who want emotional comfort food without the spice.
Even the production feels oddly airbrushed. The cabin — supposedly deep in the Colorado wilderness — looks like an Airbnb in Aspen. The blizzard looks about as convincing as a snow machine at Disneyland. And Joy’s “small fashion label” office looks like it was built inside a suburban coworking space.
You can tell Perry wanted to make a simple story about healing, but somewhere between the heart and the camera, the soul got lost.
Thankfully, Joy’s best friends — the perpetually high Littia (Inayah) and the razor-tongued Ashley (Brittany S. Hall) — occasionally burst in to liven things up. They feel like they’ve wandered in from another movie, one I actually want to see.
There’s also a late-game twist that tries to tie up Joy’s career woes with a fairytale ending so absurd it makes Cinderellalook like a documentary. It’s one of those “of course she’s suddenly the toast of the fashion world” moments that’ll make you snort your hot chocolate.
Still, I found myself laughing — not because the movie’s funny, but because it’s so earnest it loops back around to being entertaining in a so-bad-it’s-cozy way.
Finding Joy isn’t the worst thing Tyler Perry has made (hello, A Madea Family Funeral), but it’s certainly the safest. It’s a Hallmark movie with a bigger budget and slightly better acting — comforting in the moment, but forgettable by the time the credits roll.
There’s an audience for this: people who just want to see two pretty people fall in love while it snows outside. But for anyone hoping Perry’s creative evolution would continue past A Jazzman’s Blues, this feels like pressing pause on progress.
I’ll give it this, though — if Perry ever opens a line of “Ridge’s Cabin Candles,” I’m buying one. The man knows how to shoot a cozy room.
