You, Me, Us, the Italian romantic comedy Daniele Luchetti has made for Netflix, starts from a couple that should not work on paper. Simone, played by Elio Germano, is a structured man with a strong sense of family. Lucia, played by Maria Chiara Giannetta, is independent, allergic to conventions and has always been against motherhood. The film does not split them up over it. It sends them to adopt a child.

That choice is the decision the whole film hangs on. A couple that disagrees about children can argue in private for years; a pregnancy, planned or not, ends the argument by biology. Adoption ends nothing on its own. It is the route to parenthood where two people have to choose together, out loud, and keep choosing, and where the disagreement can no longer stay inside the relationship. The Italian title, Noi un po’ meglio, roughly “us, a little better”, names the bargain. Not a perfect couple. One trying to improve enough to be trusted with a child.

A negotiation with no final clause

The official synopsis gives their love a soundtrack: “a continuous, meticulous and amusing negotiation about everything”. That is the comic engine, and it is an old one. The couple as a standing committee that never reaches a quorum has fed Italian comedy for decades. What raises the stakes here is the object on the table. Arguing over where to live, or whose parents get Christmas, is sitcom material. Arguing over whether one of you wants the child you are both applying for is a different kind of scene.

Lucky Red, which produced the film, describes it as a sentimental comedy about facing your own fears and desires in an attempt to be yourself, a bit better. On paper the fear belongs to Lucia and the desire to Simone. The premise leaves open which of them has more to lose once the process starts, and that open question is where the comedy has room to work.

Luchetti and Germano, fifth time out

This is the fifth film Luchetti and Germano have made together, and the record matters. Mio fratello è figlio unico set two brothers against each other across Italy’s political decades. La nostra vita was Italy’s only film in competition at Cannes that year, and Germano shared the best actor prize with Javier Bardem for playing a construction worker holding his sons together after his wife’s death. Io sono Tempesta, a social comedy opposite Marco Giallini, came next, then Confidenza, adapted from Domenico Starnone’s novel.

Across that run Luchetti has kept filming men under domestic pressure. You, Me, Us moves the pressure into comedy and hands Germano the conventional position, the man who wants the family. It is his character, not hers, who holds the view a romantic comedy usually rewards. That reversal of who carries the “normal” side is the first thing the casting announces.

Giannetta is the new element. Italian audiences know her from Rai prime time: she became the first woman to play the carabinieri captain in Don Matteo, as Anna Olivieri, and took her first lead in Blanca. Much of the Italian coverage of the announcement has focused on the move itself, a face of public-broadcaster fiction crossing to Netflix. Casting her as the woman who refuses motherhood puts a performer with a family-audience following on the side of the argument that screen romance tends to write as the obstacle.

Around the pair sits a familiar Italian bench: Ilaria Spada, Filippo Nigro, Anna Bonaiuto, Dajana Roncione, Caterina Guzzanti, Jacopo Olmo Antinori and Francesca Romana De Martini. Enrico Audenino, Davide Lantieri and Serena Patrignanelli wrote the screenplay with Luchetti. Andrea Laszlo De Simone, the Turin songwriter whose score for The Animal Kingdom won a César, wrote the music, and Ivan Casalgrandi is the cinematographer.

The childfree lead

The real-world anchor is close at hand. Choosing not to have children is now a position people state openly, and Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, which turns the question of who wants children into a national conversation rather than a private one. A woman who says no to motherhood no longer has to be a punchline or a warning. She can be the lead. The harder question, the one this premise reaches for, is what happens to that no when the person you love keeps saying yes.

You, Me, Us also sits in a strand Italian cinema knows well: the couple comedy as social X-ray, the line that runs through Paolo Genovese’s Perfetti sconosciuti, where a dinner party turns into an audit of every marriage at the table. What this film adds is an outside party. In a dinner-party comedy the couple only has to survive itself. In an adoption story, someone else eventually decides whether the two of them are ready.

Festival first, then Netflix

The release plan puts the festival first. The film screens out of competition in the Grand Public section of the Festa del Cinema di Roma before it reaches Netflix, a route that gives a streaming title a red carpet and first reactions at home before it goes out to subscribers. It is also Luchetti’s first film for the platform. For Netflix, an Italian romantic comedy with a Cannes-winning lead and a Rai star is exactly the kind of local title it wants travelling beyond Italy under an English name.

Two people who cannot agree on whether they want a child are about to ask to be given one. The film’s title offers “a little better” as the target. Whether a little better is enough, for the couple or for whoever has to judge them, is the question the premise sets up and cannot settle before the first scene.

You, Me, Us: release date, cast and where to watch

You, Me, Us premieres on Netflix on 29 October 2026. Before that it plays out of competition in the Grand Public section of the 21st Festa del Cinema di Roma, which runs from 13 to 25 October. Daniele Luchetti directs; Elio Germano plays Simone and Maria Chiara Giannetta plays Lucia, with Ilaria Spada, Filippo Nigro, Anna Bonaiuto, Dajana Roncione and Caterina Guzzanti in the cast. It is a Lucky Red production in Italian, released internationally as You, Me, Us. Netflix has not announced a runtime.

Is it based on a true story or a book? The official material presents neither: it is credited as an original screenplay by Enrico Audenino, Davide Lantieri and Serena Patrignanelli with Luchetti.