WHETHER Lasse Hallstrom’s latest film is melodramatic romance or romantic melodrama has been exercising my mind since leaving the cinema. There is a difference, if you care to think about it. 

Distraught Katie (Julianne Hough) runs to a neighbour’s house. She later gets on a bus that makes a comfort stop in Southport. Back in Boston, detective Tierney (Aussie actor David Lyons) begins an inquiry about her.

In Southport’s balmy seaside climate, Katie gets a waitressing job. She rents a house in the woods. She meets storekeeper Alex (Josh Duhamel), a widower with two kids. Neighbour Jo (Cobie Smulders) strikes up a friendship. For Katie, life looks better than it did when she got on the bus. While she bonds with Alex’s kids and a slow-burning romance with Alex develops, Tierney has posted an APB in police stations all across the US to locate her.

Hallstrom delivers Katie’s story against a background of idyllic small-town life. Don’t let serendipity lull you into a comfort zone. Leslie Bohem and Dana Stevens’s screenplay confects a double-barrelled denouement that, while it doesn’t exactly whack you over the head with a baseball bat, sneaks up to deliver enough credibility to justify its precedents and send you out feeling moderately-well entertained without having any message forced on you. Nor any resolution of which of those two genres best fits.

At Dendy, Capitol 6, Hoyts and Limelight