Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (2025) – Review

Quick Thoughts

• Grade – B+
• Director Laura Piani has crafted an unabashed romantic comedy that features all the familiar tropes (dancing, karaoke, love triangles, writing, lies, sex, bookstores, meet cutes), but still manages to feel fresh and likable
• Camille Rutherford is perfection
• The 98 minutes fly by
• Between Rye Lane, Anyone But You, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, Palm Springs, The Half of It, I Want You Back, and Fire Island, rom-coms are in a good place.

The neat thing about Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is that it knows it’s a rom-com and doesn’t shy away from genre tropes or characteristics. Director/writer Laura Piani set out to make an unabashed rom-com and the result is a warm, funny and literate experience. I’ve always been a fan of rom-coms and I love when they lean into the genre and manage to make familiar tropes feel fresh. Last year I got tasked with the enviable job of analyzing 86 R-rated romantic comedies to figure out the perfect R-rated rom-com. During the research, I created a list of 11 tropes and characteristics that appear in most of the films (lies, sex, love triangles, singing, dancing, books) – and learned that on average, each of the 86 films features eight of the tropes/characteristics. This means that no matter how great (Rye Lane, Grosse Pointe Blank), or terrible (Good Luck Chuck, My Best Friend’s Girlfriend), rom-coms mostly stick to a playbook. 

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is an example of a rom-com that leans into tropes successfully to create a fresh and familiar experience. The film revolves around a bookseller named Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) who gets herself invited to a Jane Austin writers’ residency after a wildly successful drunken writing session. After years of conceiving and abandoning book ideas, the self-described “Palme d’Or of losers” finds the courage to leave her home in France and travel to a sprawling English estate where she’ll hopefully find inspiration on the grounds that Jane Austen once walked on. Since it’s a rom-com, she doesn’t write much and instead, she gets drunk, sings karaoke, and pukes on the shoes of a handsome man named Oliver (Charlie Anson). Agathe is an interesting character in that she’s quick-witted and kind but also considers herself to be a genuine imposter (with imposter syndrome) and she compares herself to Anne Elliot, the “spinster” character from Persuasion. Agathe is haunted by a car accident that killed both her parents and refuses to drive or leave her town. This is why her best friend Félix (Pablo Pauly) drives her to the France to England ferry, and before she leaves, they share a kiss. What’s great about Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is that minutes after Agathe and Félix kiss she comes across the handsome Oliver, and the love triangle commences! I won’t spoil the rest, just know that a lot of rom-com shenanigans happen on the estate. 

In an interview with IndieWire, Piani stated “I wanted to make a comedy about writing and the absurdity and the difficulty of what it means to write when everything in life pushes you to not do that and to do something else, because it’s the hardest thing in the world.” I’ve never sold a screenplay or published a book (working on it though! – it’s taking a while), but I completely understand what Piani is saying. Writing is tough, but it’s films like this that motivate me to find my “ruins.” Oddly enough, a viewing of the rom-com Forgetting Sarah Marshall motivated me to start writing in 2008, and it led me on an interesting 17-year journey.

Final thoughts – Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is wonderful. Watch it!