Meg Ryan's romcom return, 'What Happens Later,' hits theaters in October

“What Happens Later,” Meg Ryan’s previously announced return to romantic comedies, now has a release date of Oct. 13, distributor Bleecker Street announced Wednesday.

Both directed by and starring Ryan, playing opposite “The X-Files” and “Californication” star David Duchovny, the “Twilight Zone”-like tale finds a former couple meeting for the first time after 25 years when both are snowstorm-stranded at an unspecified airport. As the 2½ minute trailer shows, everyone else eventually goes away, leaving only the two of them and the snarky disembodied voice of the airport announcer, or perhaps of the airport itself.

“Indefinitely delayed, Willa, a magical thinker, and Bill, a catastrophic one, find themselves just as attracted to and annoyed by one another as they did decades earlier,” reads the film’s official description. “But as they unpack the riddle of their mutual past and compare their lives to the dreams they once shared, they begin to wonder if their reunion is mere coincidence, or something more enchanted.”

Neither Ryan, 61, marking her second directorial effort after “Ithaca,” her 2015 adaptation of the 1943 William Saroyan novel “The Human Comedy,” nor Duchovny, 63, has commented on social media. In quotes provided to Entertainment Weekly magazine from an interview from an unstated source, conducted before the ongoing actors strike, Ryan said the film “has a relationship to movies from the '40s, like ‘Bringing Up Baby,’ [released in 1938] in terms of the banter and the rhythm of things [from] that era of filmmaking."

She said the acclaimed late filmmaker Nora Ephron — who wrote Ryan's 1989 hit “When Harry Met Sally ...” and both wrote and directed the hits “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993) and “You’ve Got Mail” (1998) — “used to say about rom-coms that they were really a secretly incredible delivery system to comment on the times, and we do that in this movie."

Ryan added, "These rom-coms really work when the two characters are somehow opposites and yet have a rhythm of intellect and humor and dialogue and banter that sort of indicates their compatibility. So, it's just been really fun to see David embrace this guy who I don't think is anything really like David. Whereas the Willa thing I can really relate to. To see him dive into every single scene in the fullest way, he's funny, and he's smart, and he's dear, and irresistible."