Stream It Or Skip It: ‘You Do You’ On Netflix, A Turkish Rom-Com That’s Also A Revenge Story

How many rom-coms feature a leading man trying to avenge his father’s death by ruining the life of the woman he holds responsible, and then he falls in love with her? Netflix’s You Do You is one of the more intriguing rom-coms we’ve ever seen thanks to it’s revenge plot, and while the tone can sometimes feel a little dark, it ultimately earns its happy ending.

YOU DO YOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The camera pans up the side of a large, old apartment building, the Kültür Apartments, and zooms into the window belonging to a young woman named Merve Kültür (Ahsen Eroğlu). We watch as she gathers up her art supplies and looks for the perfect outfit. She tiptoes to a much larger bedroom, turns and breaks the fourth wall, asking, “Who acts like a burglar in their own home?” before flinging the doors to a much larger closet open and stealing one of her mother’s jackets.

The Gist: Merve is the type of protagonist we’ll call artsy. She’s free-spirited, hates capitalism and, and wants to be a fashion designer. She lives with her mother Nevra (Zuhal Olcay), who would rather Merve get a job in business or finance and be practical, but for Merve, that’s akin to dying a slow death. They live on the top floor of a gorgeous old apartment building owned by Merve’s estranged father, hence his name on the building, and when Merve learns he plans to sell it, she and everyone else in the building panic. Her neighbors are all like family, and they’ve been living there on the cheap for years. Unless someone does something fast, they’re all going to be homeless. They also have no idea who the buyer is, adding an air of mystery to the situation.

Merve, her best friend Nil (Burcu Turunz) and the rest of their friends come up with an idea for an app to make them rich: it’s a dating app called Soulmates that sounds like The Masked Singer meets Love is Blind. Users try to meet their soulmates on video chats while their faces are obscured by animal masks so they get to know people on personality alone. It sounds ridiculous, but they manage to find an investor, a successful businessman named Anil Gurman (Ozan Dolunay) who not only advances them the money to develop the app, but he hires Merve to work for his e-commerce company. But Anil’s motives are shady, he explains to his assistant that he’s only hiring Merve to mess with her (despite the fact that she doesn’t know him), and he gives her increasingly difficult and annoying tasks that are meant to wear her down, but she does them all cheerfully. In fact, she’s kind of thriving despite him, and she starts an Instagram account where she uses the hashtag #YouDoYou to celebrate her style and the fun she has at work and beyond. While she works, Anil watches her on closed-circuit cameras to see how she’s handling his form of torture and he eventually seems to be charmed by her, despite his wanting to destroy her life, for some reason.

Then, Anil joins Soulmates and anonymously starts video chatting Merve to find out more about her. He wears a wolf mask to hide his identity, and she wears a mask that looks like a gazelle. Anil is charming as he gets to know Merve, but it’s very one-sides and he rarely reveals anything about himself. The one strange thing he does reveal to her is when he tells her one night that he wants to “avenge his family.” Huh. Okay. Still, at this point Merve doesn’t know it’s Anil under the mask, and she starts to fall for him. Oh, and what she also doesn’t know, but we do, is that Anil is also the mystery buyer of her apartment building. This man has not only given her a job under false pretenses, but he’s seducing her and stealing her home away from her, all in the name of revenge.

Revenge for what?

Years ago, Merve’s mother Nevra, a former journalist, exposed Anil’s father’s shady business practices and publicly humiliated him, and he died (Was it suicide? It’s never made clear.) And not only that, he was in love with Nevra, just to add a layer to Anil’s anger at Merve’s family. Merve’s father bought the apartment building from Anil’s mother so she could pay her debts after her husband died, and Anil blames his destroyed family and miserable childhood on Merve’s family. So revenge is the only answer. He’s going to buy back the home he lost as a child, and ruin the life of the girl who “stole” his childhood.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? It sounds weird, but given Anil’s lifelong goal to avenge his family, the movie asks the question, “What if Oldboy was a romantic comedy?”

Our Take: For much of the movie, which maintains a light and charming tone throughout, it’s impossible to know whether You Do You is actually a kind of dark revenge tale that will end horribly or a charming meet-cute. The answer is, it’s both! Up to a point.

For a lot of the movie, Anil seems charming and like he’s truly enamored with Merve, which feels sociopathic given how much he talks about wanting revenge on her. In the same way that Jury Duty felt light and fun most of the time, but some viewers felt queasy about a show based on an extended prank at one person’s expense (despite the good-natured vibe of that show), there are moments in You Do You that feel like Anil’s desire for revenge goes too far, too.

By the end though, Anil… wait for it… goes to China to meditate on what he did, and comes to realize he has lived his life fueled by anger and revenge, which serves no one. So he heads back to Istanbul to profess his love for Merve and return the building he bought back to the tenants who all thought they had to move out. Ultimately, this movie is a meet cute with a happy ending, but, oh, the detours we take to get there!

Sex and Skin: Some kissing but that’s it.

Parting Shot: Merve and Anil walk up the Camondo Steps, the spot where he spied on her, where she took many a selfie to promote her fashion, the place he knows she loves, but this time, they’re ascending the stair as a couple, as they go to check out a photo shoot for her fashion line. Everything’s coming together!

Sleeper Star: Ferot Aktug plays Sehmuz, Merve’s tarot and tea-leaf-reading neighbor who adds some fun laughs to the film.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I wish you were my boss,” Merve tells the “anonymous” soulmate she meets on her app… who actually is her boss, Anil.

Our Call: By the time it was all over, I really liked You Do You. Through the film, there were moments when I was utterly confused because the film painted Anil as a maybe-unstable voyeur for a while there, and it’s no fun to root for that guy in a romantic comedy. But to Ozan Dolunay’s credit, he never paints Anil as purely a one-note creep. In fact, none of the characters come off as caricatures, and that goes a long way toward making this film worth watching. If you want a rom-com that’s very charming but weird but mostly charming, STREAM IT.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.