Hallmark Channel
The Hallmark Channel’s penultimate ‘Loveuary’ movie is the workplace romance Return to Office, which has an interesting premise for the romance, but also injects some real world issues into the story.
Return to Office stars Janel Parrish as Liv, an employee at a tech company, basically the right hand to her boss. The story makes no reference to the global pandemic that caused many offices to shut down and move to remote work to keep operating but this is clearly what is implied as the boss (Christopher Shyer) decides, without warning, that everyone will return to work in person. Liv has grown accustomed to her at home schedule and is not thrilled with the new edict, and she reminds her boss that the office does not have the desk space for all of the employees who have been working remotely. No problem — they will work on a hybrid schedule with half of the staff coming in Monday and Wednesday, the other half on Tuesday and Thursday, and Friday is a complete work at home day. It’s not ideal, but Liv can live with it. Once at the office — after arriving late and missing out on getting the desk of her choice — Liv is forced to sit near the kitchen area (she cannot deal with noise or smells, and someone is always gleefully blending a smoothie), and she has to share her workspace with whoever is there Tuesday and Thursday. She leaves a note asking to please keep her succulent on the desk because it needs constant light and she goes home after work. On Tuesday, her desk mate Tom (Scott Michael Foster), the lead graphic designer for the company, has no problem with the plant and decides to leave some of his own items on display to spruce up the place. Liv is apparently a neat and control freak as well, and promptly removes the artwork he placed on the divider wall and puts that and his rubber duck in the drawer. Not happy about this, Tom decides to get even and put the succulent in the drawer when he leaves the next day, launching a little war of Post-It Notes with Liv … and neither of them know who the other is because Liv signed her first note ‘Ms. Monday’ and Tom played along and signed his ‘Mr. Tuesday’.
The two find a common ground and keep exchanging notes, still unaware of who they are communicating with, becoming increasingly cordial and playful as time goes on. On Liv’s Thursday off, she volunteers at a senior community where she teaches quilting. Unbeknownst to her, one of her new students is a new resident who happens to be … Tom’s mother. After a few weeks, she and her friend can tell Liv is much happier than she’s been and she tells them about the mystery office romance. When Tom comes to visit his mother, he also mentions a romance and it isn’t long before she puts two-and-two together and hints to Liv that her secret romance is actually Tom. The two have actually met at end of week meetings but never put things together, and now that Liv knows she is still willing to go on the date the two planned — after at first agreeing to keep their relationship strictly by notes — but things don’t go as planned. Liv and Tom had already had a little dust-up at the office when she didn’t back him up when their boss decided he should be the one to design the new logo, and while she was planning to reveal that she was Ms. Monday, he was too busy unloading his frustrations on her, making her feel that maybe it’s best to keep things secret. But Tom’s mother and her friend conspire to get the two together again, but office politics rears its ugly head again and could possibly derail any chance to two have at acknowledging their feelings. Liv realizes she has to make a choice to put either her job or her relationship on the line.
Return to Office has a fun premise with the notes but this plot-point gets dragged out for way too long. The entire first half of the movie, outside of one or two in person encounters, has Liv and Tom communicating only by Post-It Notes, with Parrish and Foster delivering their dialogue via voice-over. The whole thing with the notes is also a bit bizarre because we are clearly shown the two of them writing, we can see their handwriting, but then notes that are shown in close-up are obviously not the same note we saw being written. In fact, the handwriting on both Liv’s and Tom’s notes looks like the same crew member wrote for both of them for the close-ups. This takes you out of the story for a bit, but the time it takes for them to finally have their first ‘date’ seems like it will never come which makes the movie pleasant enough but not as engaging as it should be.
Hallmark Channel
However that all changes when Tom and Liv finally meet up and their personal dynamics can finally be seen on full display. It’s at this point that Parrish really makes us become invested in Liv’s feelings, using her facial expressions and body language to show how deflated she becomes as Tom gives her a piece of his mind about what happened at the office, her utter dejection when she was ready to surprise him with the reveal that she is Ms. Monday. And while Tom does have a point that Liv threw him under the bus, he still needs to realize she’s in a tough spot — he may say of her own making — in which she has to be a ‘yes man’ or she could find herself unemployed. Foster has to balance his performance between being passionate about his work and being a jerk to Liv, and he manages to not make the viewers dislike him completely. But it’s Parrish’s performance after her little bit of heartbreak, and the cute machinations of the script involving TOms’ mother and her friend, that saves the second half of the film, even giving us one real laugh-out-loud moment when TOm’s mother is not-so-subtly trying to get him to notice Liv’s picture on the wall with the other staff members at the facility.
Catherine Barroll is very good as Tom’s mother, and she has a great working relationship with both Foster and Parrish. She also plays well off of Jennifer Higgin as her friend as the two scheme to get Liv and Tom together. Christopher Shyer is appropriately pompous as the boss, seemingly just full of himself for most of the movie but then revealing a surprisingly sinister side to himself that puts a spotlight on the real world issue now of the use of AI to create text and artwork, replacing the real creative artists in the world. Erik Gow also pops in and out of scenes as Chad, the head of HR for the company, but his often over-the-top performance is a bit at odds with the more realistic tone of the story.
Steven J. King’s screenplay is more clever after the halfway point and really saves this from being a completely mediocre movie, and Peter Benson does enough to keep the first half visually interesting while finally getting to delve into the character development and various puzzle pieces of the plot to make it all come together in the end. The cast is uniformly good, but Parrish is the stand-out, showing the range of characters she can perform from Haunted Wedding to Sugarplummed to this. All in all, while it takes a good 45 minutes (without commercials) to really get the story rolling, once we crack the halfway point it becomes a totally enjoyable romp.
Return to Office has a run time of 1 hour 24 minutes, and is rated TV-G. The film is streaming on Hallmark+.
Preview – Return to Office
Hallmark Channel