TL;DR: The Last Sunrise has attractive leads, Mallorca sunshine and plenty of dramatic ammunition, but thin character development and overcooked melodrama prevent its central romance from truly catching fire.

 

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a shamelessly glossy summer romance. Give me gorgeous people, an absurdly beautiful European location, complicated parents and enough yearning to power a small Death Star, and I’m willing to play along. The Last Sunrise arrives on Prime Video with most of those ingredients already assembled, adapting Anna Todd’s 2025 novel into a Mallorca-set romantic drama starring Maia Reficco, Fernando Lindez and Eva Longoria. Unfortunately, having all the components of a deliciously addictive YA romance is not the same as knowing what to do with them. This is a movie that keeps reaching for sweeping emotion while forgetting that romance works best when we actually become invested in the people doing the falling.

A Mallorca romance with much heavier baggage

Maia Reficco plays Oriah, a young dancer living with tuberous sclerosis, a genetic condition that can cause tumours to develop in different organs. After suffering a seizure on stage, she faces a difficult medical decision involving stronger medication or surgery that could potentially affect her memory. She travels with her mother, Isolde Pera (Eva Longoria), to Mallorca, where Isolde grew up and where her company, Redwyn, has plans for a luxury hotel development. Against this already busy backdrop, Oriah meets local fisherman Julián Garcia (Fernando Lindez), and the inevitable summer romance begins.

That premise actually gives The Last Sunrise more dramatic ammunition than your average beautiful-people-meet-in-paradise movie. Oriah isn’t simply deciding whether to surrender herself to a holiday romance; her health and relationship with her own emotions give that decision considerably more weight. The problem is that the film frequently treats these potentially fascinating ideas as plot switches rather than material worth properly exploring. Oriah’s medication, for example, supposedly leaves her emotionally numb, motivating choices that become crucial to the romance, but the movie doesn’t develop that internal struggle with enough nuance. When the emotional mechanics are this important, telling me how a character feels isn’t nearly as effective as making me feel it alongside her.

Maia Reficco and Fernando Lindez struggle against the screenplay

Reficco has the unenviable job of holding together a protagonist surrounded by medical drama, family complications, romantic longing and escalating melodrama. Yet Oriah often feels strangely passive within her own story, with major complications arriving around her rather than emerging convincingly through her decisions. That’s a significant problem because The Last Sunrise desperately needs her perspective to be its emotional anchor. Reficco can only do so much when the screenplay doesn’t give Oriah enough texture or progression to make each emotional beat land.

Lindez’s Julián brings another major conflict into the equation because his family’s longstanding fishing business is threatened by Redwyn’s ambitions. Naturally, discovering that your summer romance is connected to the corporation threatening your livelihood isn’t exactly the ideal relationship status update. It gives Oriah and Julián’s attraction a potentially juicy class and family divide, but the movie prefers broad melodrama over carefully building that tension. Their relationship is asked to carry enormous emotional stakes before the storytelling has done enough grinding to unlock them. It’s romance operating with the XP requirement turned off.

Eva Longoria, meanwhile, brings useful screen presence to Isolde, a character whose history and business interests tie several threads together. Her casting also suits a film that increasingly embraces soap-opera energy as family secrets and heightened confrontations pile up. That approach could have been entertaining if The Last Sunrise fully committed to being gloriously messy. Instead, it occupies an awkward middle ground where the material is too exaggerated to feel intimate but played too straight to become irresistible trashy fun.

The Last Sunrise wastes Mallorca’s biggest advantage

Perhaps the strangest disappointment is how little personality Mallorca contributes to the movie. Setting a romantic drama on a Spanish island should basically be activating a cinematic cheat code. Location can become part of the seduction: the light, architecture, coastline, food, communities and tiny geographical details should make viewers understand why people fall in love there and why Julián might fight desperately to protect his family’s connection to it.

Instead, Mallorca often functions more as attractive scenery than a genuinely inhabited place. That’s particularly damaging because the conflict surrounding the Garcia family’s livelihood depends on understanding what this home means to them. If the film wants corporate development versus generational attachment to carry dramatic weight, then the environment cannot merely look pretty behind the actors. We need to understand its identity and emotional value.

Romance cinema has repeatedly demonstrated that location can practically become another member of the cast. The Last Sunrise has sunshine, water and photogenic vistas, but it lacks that intoxicating sense of place that makes you mentally check flight prices before the credits finish. For a movie with “sunrise” in its title, it is surprisingly reluctant to make its world feel magical.

Melodrama keeps overpowering the actual love story

The larger issue is that The Last Sunrise keeps adding complications when it should be deepening the ones it already has. Oriah’s condition alone could support a thoughtful story about fear, memory, bodily autonomy and choosing how fully to experience an uncertain life. Add a romance with Julián and the conflict involving their families, and there is already plenty on the table. Instead, additional secrets, financial problems and soapier developments compete for attention.

Melodrama isn’t inherently the enemy here. Some of the greatest romances ever made are essentially emotional boss battles with beautiful lighting. The difference is that heightened drama only works when viewers are sufficiently attached to the characters that every new obstacle hurts. The Last Sunrise too often seems interested in what happens next rather than why what happens matters.

That also means the central romance never becomes as intoxicating as it needs to be. Attractive leads and Mediterranean scenery provide an easy baseline, but chemistry requires space: conversations, vulnerability, personality clashes and small moments that convince us two particular people cannot help being drawn together. When plot machinery continually interrupts that process, love starts feeling like another requirement of the screenplay rather than the force driving it.

Verdict

The Last Sunrise has the raw ingredients for an addictive Prime Video romance: Maia Reficco and Fernando Lindez as photogenic leads, Eva Longoria adding star power, Mallorca providing a gorgeous backdrop, and a premise combining first love with genuinely difficult questions about health, family and the future. There is a stronger, more emotionally intimate movie buried somewhere inside all of that.

Unfortunately, the finished film repeatedly chooses complication over character and melodrama over emotional development. Mallorca never becomes the vivid romantic playground it should be, Oriah isn’t given enough agency to fully command her own story, and the relationship at the centre struggles to generate the emotional gravity demanded by everything surrounding it. Fans of Anna Todd adaptations and glossy YA romances may still find enough longing, beautiful scenery and heightened drama here for an easy stream. Anyone hoping for the kind of summer romance that leaves you emotionally wrecked and immediately searching for flights to Spain will probably be left waiting for a sunrise that never quite arrives.