The Last Sunrise is Rated R for by Motion Picture Rating (MPA) for some sexuality, nudity and language
This movie follows Oriah “Ry” Pera, a college student whose chronic illness has taught her to negotiate rather than fight with her own body. Her mother Isolde (Eva Longoria) hauls her to Mallorca under the pretense of a summer trip; the real agenda is a hotel deal Isolde needs closed before the season ends. Ry expects to spend the trip bored and managed.
She doesn’t expect Julián (Fernando Lindez), and neither does the film’s pacing, which spends its entire first act refusing to rush toward him, a choice that either reads as confidence or as a director padding runtime with coastline, depending on your patience for shots of motorbikes on cliff roads.
Todd’s source novel is a romance first and an illness narrative second, and Klassen’s script mostly keeps that hierarchy, though the seams show. Ry’s condition gets mentioned early and then goes quiet for long stretches, not ignored, exactly, more like set down while the film handles other things, which is a legitimate storytelling choice but also a slightly convenient one. It lets the Mallorca stretch play as unclouded as a perfume ad before the plot needs the diagnosis to matter again.
Where the film earns its keep is Amara (Chloé Sweetlove), whose friend group functions as the version of Ry that exists when nobody’s managing her, later nights, less caution, a social world Isolde doesn’t fully clock. It’s the most alive stretch of the movie because it’s the one place the script lets Ry make a bad decision without immediately punishing her for it.
Contrast that with the Isolde-Mateo (Andrés Velencoso) business thread, which exists mainly to manufacture a coincidence, Mateo is Julián’s brother, and he’s also the landowner Isolde needs to sign, and never quite earns the soap-opera swing it’s going for, even with Longoria working overtime to make Isolde’s panic feel like more than plot mechanics.
The midpoint pivot is the film’s best instinct: rather than announcing Ry’s decline with a single dramatic collapse, Klassen’s script routes it through a confrontation between Ry and Isolde where a long-withheld family secret surfaces, the reason for Isolde’s control issues, not just an obstacle for the romance.
That’s a smarter structural choice than the trailer’s “chase the sunrise” marketing suggests, and it’s the point where Young’s direction, previously content to admire the scenery, starts making the frame do work, tighter, closer, less interested in the horizon than it was thirty minutes earlier.
What it doesn’t do is commit. The back half compresses a full relationship arc into borrowed time, which is the genre’s oldest trick, and the ending splits the difference between tragedy and fantasy rather than picking one, a hedge that will play as tasteful restraint to some audiences and as cowardice to others.
I’d argue it’s the latter: the film builds toward a reckoning and then flinches from it in the last ten minutes, which undercuts a midpoint that had actually done the harder, better work.
The Last Sunrise Content Breakdown
Based on the MPA rating language, the novel’s known content, and the trailer’s tonal cues, with the caveat above that exact placement should be confirmed against the finished cut, the sexual content clusters rather than spreads.
There’s one extended intimate scene establishing the Ry-Julián relationship, consistent with the “sexuality and nudity” language on the rating and with press coverage describing the source novel’s sex scenes as “well-described” but “not very erotic” suggesting emotional weight over explicitness, which lines up with how Todd’s other adaptations have generally handled these beats. Expect brief nudity rather than sustained explicit exposure.
A second, shorter intimate scene is likely later in the film, tied to the “borrowed time” urgency of the back half, these tend to be staged with more restraint than the first, narratively, since the point is usually desperation rather than discovery.
The party sequence anchored by Amara’s friend group is where background content, implied activity, incidental nudity at the edges of frame, is most likely to show up, the kind of thing an inattentive viewer misses on a first watch.
Language is reportedly not constant; expect it concentrated in the argument scenes once the family secret surfaces, plus casual profanity in the social scenes with Amara’s group, rather than spread evenly. Alcohol is social and visible, wine at meals, drinks at the party, with no indication of drug use or depicted impairment as a plot point.
The content most likely to actually affect a family isn’t on the rating card at all: the illness storyline. A story that treats a chronic, worsening condition as the emotional engine of a family secret can land harder on a kid who’s watched a parent or sibling go through something similar than any of the R-rated content will, that’s worth more consideration than the MPA descriptor gives it credit for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Last Sunrise suitable for young fans of the original novel?
No. While younger teens may have read Anna Todd’s book, the film adaptation earns its R rating through lingering visual sensuality, partial nudity, and intense medical panic scenes. It is best reserved for older teens (16+) and adults.
How explicit are the romantic scenes compared to typical PG-13 teen movies?
They are noticeably more mature. Unlike PG-13 romances that cut to black after a kiss, this film stays in the room, depicting extended intimacy, partial rear nudity, and clear implied sexual acts.
Does the movie feature heavy substance use or wild party scenes?
There are several sequences set at outdoor bars and beach bonfires featuring social drinking and background cigarette use. However, recreational drug abuse and out-of-control partying are not plot drivers or featured elements.
How difficult are the medical distress scenes for sensitive viewers?
They are emotionally heavy and visually frank. The film does not gloss over the physical reality of chronic illness; scenes involving emergency oxygen, hospital panic, and physical deterioration are staged with jarring realism.
Rebecca Hollis is the founder of Screen Parent Guide and a film content analyst with seven years of experience reviewing films for an independent ratings consultancy. A Film Studies graduate of Emerson College, she specialized in content classification and how ratings systems communicate, and often fail to communicate, what families can expect from a movie.