Someone Like You

Karen Kingsbury is one of America's best-selling Christian romance novelists, and 'Someone Like You' is the first adaptation of one of her books made by her own production company. Her eldest son, Tyler Russell, directs, and the two of them wrote the script from her 2020 novel. It's a drama about grief, second chances and a sister nobody knew existed.

Dawson (Jake Allyn) is an architect in Birmingham, Alabama, who's been secretly in love with his best friend London (Sarah Fisher) since high school. She loves him, but only as a friend, and the Quinns treat him almost like a son of their own. Then London is killed in an accident. Soon after, her parents, Louise (Lynn Collins) and Larry (Scott Reeves), tell him something she never knew: she was an IVF baby, and a second embryo went to another family.

Dawson sets out to find that sister and tracks down Andi, also played by Fisher. She lives in Nashville, has just started a job at the zoo and is in a serious relationship with her boyfriend, Matt. She has no idea how she was conceived, so a stranger turning up to talk about a biological sister turns her life upside down, and her parents' too (Robyn Lively and Bart Johnson). Back at the Quinns', there's another worry: Louise needs a kidney transplant.

It was shot in late 2022 across Tennessee and Alabama. Lively and Johnson, who play husband and wife, are married in real life, and he played the father of Zac Efron's character in 'High School Musical'. Matt is played by Austin Robert Russell, Kingsbury's youngest son.

Fathom Events opened it in US cinemas on 2 April 2024, and it went on to take around $5.9 million there. Mainstream critics were mostly unimpressed and compared it to a Hallmark TV movie or a Nicholas Sparks story, while most faith-based outlets were kinder.

• Romance
• Drama