Item: Then Came You
Rating: 5.2
Author: Molly Se-kyung

Adriana Trigiani made the right call filming in Argyll. The inn at Loch Fyne, the Kilmorich Church, the morning light spreading across Ardkinglas House — none of it is subtle, but all of it works. Then Came You is a film that leans heavily on Scotland’s Highlands to do the emotional labor its script cannot, and for long stretches the landscape obliges.

Kathie Lee Gifford wrote the screenplay as well as starring in it, and the transparency of the project is both its warmth and its limit. Her character, Annabelle Wilson, is a widow from Nantucket who has been left instructions by her late husband to scatter his ashes at locations from the films they loved together — starting with Scotland, because Forrest Gump was his favorite. The conceits are endearing. The execution is more variable. Gifford delivers Annabelle with genuine feeling, but the dialogue she wrote for herself keeps arriving just slightly ahead of where it should, polished when it ought to be rough, resolved when the scene wants something left unfinished.

Craig Ferguson is the film’s best argument for itself. As Howard, the Scots innkeeper who is one week from a wedding to a woman who is almost certainly wrong for him, Ferguson operates in a register the script barely earns. He takes lines that should land flat and turns them on an axis. A scene where Annabelle and Howard discover a shared love of old movies — the kind of scene romcoms handle with montage and swelling strings — instead slows around Ferguson’s timing. He withholds. He considers. He lets Gifford catch up. It is the kind of performance that rarely survives being discussed because the mechanism is invisible.

Trigiani knows what she has. The camera stays on Ferguson when the script doesn’t know where to go, and he finds somewhere to go. Phyllida Law, as Howard’s mother, brings the same understated precision to a smaller part. Ford Kiernan grounds the comic register without undermining the warmth. Elizabeth Hurley is underused — her character exists as an obstacle when the film needed a complication — but she handles the limitations gracefully.

The plot follows a pattern that anyone who has seen a cozy British romcom will recognize immediately: two people who shouldn’t fall for each other; a deadline that makes falling inevitable; a revelation that creates distance before the final act erases it. Then Came You doesn’t break the pattern. What it does, fitfully, is make you feel that the people inside it might actually be worth caring about — and that is almost entirely Ferguson’s doing.

The film is at its least effective when it tries hardest. A speech near the midpoint, where Annabelle tells Howard about grief in more explicit terms than the material has earned, goes on longer than the chemistry between them can sustain. The Forrest Gump frame — ashes, chocolates, the movie-mapped geography of a marriage — is sweet in concept and occasionally heavy-handed in practice.

But the Highlands are the Highlands, and Then Came You understands that. The film asks you to believe in a second-chance love story between two people who are not starting over so much as continuing after interruption. In that narrower, more honest aspiration, and with Ferguson holding the center, it earns enough of what it reaches for.

Then Came You was distributed in the United States by Vertical Entertainment. The film was shot on location in Inveraray and across Argyll and Bute, Scotland.