Toscana (2022) Review – Sometimes, It Is Only When We Empty Our Hands That They Are Finally Ready to Receive

 

Header illustration for the review essay of Toscana (2022).

Illustration created for editorial review purposes.

💭 Short Personal Reflection

Toscana (2022), Mehdi Avaz's Netflix Danish romantic drama set in the Tuscan countryside, found me thinking about something I have noticed in my own life. Sometimes, when I am deeply focused on solving a problem, I reach a point where nothing works — and then, almost by accident, someone passing by says a single word, and the answer appears, embarrassingly simple. Why was I holding onto it so tightly? It happens with the smallest things, too. When I cannot find something, I ask someone else to look instead. Because when we become too absorbed, we begin to overlook what is right in front of us. Perhaps life — and even cooking — is the same. In Toscana, the act of cooking is not about control or precision alone, but about knowing when to step back. When to let things breathe. When to allow something else to enter. Because sometimes, it is only when we empty our hands that they are finally ready to receive.

🎥 Film Overview

Director	Mehdi Avaz
Release	May 18, 2022 (Netflix)
Runtime	90 minutes
Cast	Anders Matthesen (Theo Dahl), Cristiana Dell'Anna (Sophia), Ghita Nørby, Andrea Bosca

📖 Story Summary

In the Danish romantic drama Toscana (2022), written and directed by Mehdi Avaz, a celebrated Michelin-starred chef named Theo Dahl arrives in Tuscany with a simple intention: sell his late father's restaurant and return to his controlled, high-achieving life in Copenhagen. Theo has built his career on precision and control — a man who knows exactly what he wants and exactly how to get it. What he hasn't accounted for is Sophia, the warmhearted Italian woman who loved his father's restaurant and everything it stood for, and who sees, almost immediately, what Theo cannot: that the life he is running toward may be smaller than the one he is trying to sell.

The film unfolds gently across the golden landscape of the Tuscan hills — the same hills that loosened something in Theo's father, and begin, slowly, to do the same to him. Notably the first Danish Netflix Original feature film, Toscana became the most watched non-English-language film on the platform in its opening week, reaching viewers in over a hundred countries — a quiet reminder that the simplest stories, told with warmth, still travel furthest.

🌸 Key Themes

Control as a Form of Distance

Theo's perfectionism is not a flaw the film mocks — it is a wound the film tries to understand. A man who controls his kitchen down to the last degree of heat is a man who learned, somewhere along the way, that loosening his grip meant losing something. The film traces this quality not as arrogance but as armor: a way of staying safe in a world where the things that mattered most — his father, his childhood, whatever softness he once had — were never quite within reach.

What Tuscany does is not change him. It simply removes the conditions that made control feel necessary. There are no Michelin inspectors in an olive grove. There is no performance required when the only audience is the light falling through the vines. And in that space, something that had been held very tightly begins, almost without permission, to relax.

Cooking as a Way of Listening

The film's most interesting idea is the one it explores most quietly: that cooking, at its highest, is not an act of imposition but of attention. The great dish is not the one that announces itself most loudly. It is the one that listened — to the season, to the ingredient, to the moment. Theo knows how to cook perfectly. What Sophia teaches him, without quite saying it, is how to cook honestly.

This distinction — between perfection and honesty, between control and presence — runs through the film's romantic storyline as well. Theo's relationships, like his food, have always been immaculate. What he hasn't learned yet is how to be imperfect in front of someone, and to let that be enough. Sophia is not his teacher or his muse. She is simply someone who already knows how to live this way, and whose presence makes it visible.

Letting Yourself Be Held

The Tuscan landscape in Toscana is not mere backdrop. It functions, in the film's visual language, as a kind of argument: that beauty which does not demand anything of you is also a form of grace. The warm light, the unhurried meals, the way time moves differently when you are surrounded by something that has been growing for centuries — all of it asks the same question of Theo, and of the viewer: what might happen if you simply stopped pushing for a little while?

The film suggests that there is something to be found in letting ourselves be held — by a place, by a person, by a season — even briefly. Not as surrender, but as a different kind of strength. The courage to receive, rather than only to give.

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Mehdi Avaz and the Warmth of Restraint

Few directors working in the Netflix romantic drama space today use simplicity as deliberately as Mehdi Avaz. Toscana was filmed in just nineteen days on location in the Tuscan hills, and that constraint shows — not as limitation, but as focus. Avaz does not overcomplicate his framing. He trusts the landscape to do what landscapes do, and he trusts his actors to do the rest. The result is a film that feels unhurried in the best sense: one that knows it doesn't need to prove anything, and doesn't try.

The visual contrast between Copenhagen and Tuscany — the cold, sleek blues of the Danish kitchen against the warm ambers and greens of the Italian countryside — is handled with a quiet elegance that underscores the film's central argument without stating it. We feel, visually, what Theo is moving toward. We feel what he would be returning to.

Anders Matthesen and Cristiana Dell'Anna

Anders Matthesen, better known in Denmark as a comedian, brings to Theo a physical stiffness that works beautifully for the role — a man who is not comfortable in his own body, in spaces that don't belong to him. His gradual softening across the film's ninety minutes is not dramatic, but it is real. Matthesen finds the humanity in a character who could easily have been unsympathetic, and he earns the film's ending quietly.

Cristiana Dell'Anna, as Sophia, does something more difficult: she plays warmth without sentimentality, and love without desperation. Her Sophia is not defined by Theo's arrival. She has a life of her own — imperfect, unresolved, genuinely hers — and the film is smart enough to honor that. The scenes between the two actors have a natural ease that the film's detractors underestimate; chemistry this comfortable is rarer than it looks.

🌍 Where to Watch

Streaming: Netflix (worldwide)

Note: Availability varies by region and may change over time. Please check current listings in your area.

📝 Final Thoughts

Beneath its sun-drenched romantic surface, Toscana quietly asks a deeper question: what might we discover about ourselves if we stopped trying to control what comes next — and simply let the moment arrive?

Toscana is not a film that will surprise you. It knows exactly what kind of film it is, and it makes that film with care, warmth, and an honest respect for its audience's desire to be comforted rather than challenged. There is real value in that. More than three years after its release, Toscana remains exactly what it set out to be: a gentle, generous film that smells faintly of olive oil and tastes, unexpectedly, like something you needed. It is the kind of film you don't just watch — you settle into.

⭐ Who Will Appreciate This Film

For those who have ever needed permission to slow down — to stop optimizing, to stop producing, to simply be somewhere beautiful and let it do its work. Perfect for a tired evening when you want something that asks nothing of you except to be present. Recommended for viewers who loved Chef (2014) or The Taste of Things (2023) — films where cooking is a language for everything that cannot quite be said aloud. And if Toscana's warm Tuscan light stayed with you, Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) will find you again in its own unhurried way.

💭 Personal Note

I watched Toscana on an evening when I had been working too hard for too long, and I think that was exactly the right moment for it. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from gripping too tightly — from refusing to let a single thing be outside your control. I know that exhaustion well.

What the film gave me was not a solution but a question: what if I simply left it for a while? What if the answer I was searching for didn't need to be forced, but waited? I have learned, in small ways, that when I stop searching for something and ask someone else to look, they find it immediately. Not because they are smarter, but because they are not looking with the same tired eyes.

There is something in Toscana about that — about the particular grace of letting yourself be held by something outside of yourself. The Tuscan sun does not ask Theo to earn it. It simply falls on him, equally, as it falls on everything. And in that warmth, something in him loosens. Something, finally, opens.

Perhaps that is what rest actually is. Not the absence of effort, but the willingness to receive.

움켜쥔 손을 가만히 펼칠 때,
그제야 손바닥 위로 따스한 햇살이 내려앉는다.

(A reflection in Korean — because some truths about letting go and receiving feel truer in the language of the heart.)

💬 Join the Conversation

Have you ever found that the thing you were searching for most anxiously appeared the moment you stopped searching? And is there a place — a landscape, a season, a kitchen — where you find it easiest to let go of control and simply be present?

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If Toscana's meditation on slowing down, letting go, and the quiet grace of being present resonated with you, these films offer their own warm sanctuaries:

• Chef (2014) – A chef leaves behind the pressure of perfection and finds joy in cooking simply, freely, for love
• The Taste of Things (2023) – A film where cooking is a form of the deepest intimacy, and patience is its own kind of love
• Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) – A woman begins again in Tuscany, learning that life fills in the spaces we dare to leave open
• Kamome Diner (2006) – A Japanese woman opens a small diner in Helsinki and finds that simplicity, offered with care, draws people home
• Julie & Julia (2009) – Two women across decades find themselves through the transformative act of cooking

May you find your own Tuscany — and the courage to let it hold you.

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👤 About the Author

Young Lee writes at Cinematic Sanctuaries, exploring stories where slowing down, letting go, and the quiet courage to receive are treated as the most human wisdom of all.

Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.