3 hours ago
10
Rachel Morrison’s “Love of Your Life” is one of my favorite things, all too rare in today’s Hollywood: A gorgeously shot romantic drama about impossibly beautiful people that still manages to feel real enough where it matters. It’s the kind of smart, heartfelt, mid-weight entertainment that rewards you for surrendering to its logic and savoring how its light cuts through the darkness for 100 minutes — so naturally, since we live in hell, it’s only playing in theaters for a single week before it shuffles off to its forever home on Prime Video. I suppose we should be grateful that Morrison got to make it at all, as this is nothing if not a film that implores us to cherish what we still have left rather than rage at what’s been taken from us.
It starts in a decidedly unromantic place: the emergency room of a Boston hospital, where joyless and withdrawn nurse Maya (Margaret Qualley) heals people as a way of attending to the unspecified family situation that scarred her as a child. Blasting Sharon Van Etten music on the subway and grinding out 18-hour shifts in her scrubs seems to be getting the job done, but happiness is a lot harder to deny when someone becomes determined to share it with you.
In this case, that “someone” is Charlie (Gabriel Basso, far too charming for someone whose breakthrough role was playing J.D. Vance), a Mensa-smart goofball who smiles like a fool, dresses like a jock, and radiates an inner glow that shines a hole right through the lonerism that Maya has always maintained for her own protection. He was adopted at birth, and his worldview has been premised on accepting the love that he’s lucky enough to receive. Maya, by contrast, has a real “love isn’t worth the pain of losing it” vibe that has led her to stay as single and untethered as possible. At least until now.
It’s never a good omen to meet such a perfect man in the first act of a movie that obviously has some major heartache in store for its heroine, but it’s so easy to be swept away by Charlie all the same. Basso’s performance is self-possessed by a puppy dog sweetness that’s blithely indifferent to whatever male love interests are supposed to be like these days, and he endows the character with a lingering originality even though Charlie’s whole thing as a student of audio synthesis at MIT is a flagrant — if thematically pointed — ripoff of William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops.”
Maya falls hard. She makes family of Charlie’s friends (and he folds in easily with her hard-partying BFF Jason, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger), and friends of his family, even if his mom (Catherine Keener, the movie’s emotional lynchpin) seems to bristle at the couple’s surprise wedding. They make plans for the future and even talk about maybe having kids one day. And then, just as fast as she fell in love, Maya is forced to start over.
Written from her own idea by “Nyad” screenwriter Julia Cox, “Love of Your Life” doesn’t belabor its sadness, but it doesn’t skimp over it either. The bar is low when it comes to the candor with which today’s glossy studio dramas confront the known ugliness of modern life, but I was impressed by the heavy detail with which this movie addresses its defining crisis, and in turn reminded of how Morrison — whose work on “Mudbound” made her the first woman ever nominated for Best Cinematography before she became a director — did a similarly graceful job of balancing the weight of reality against the concision and utility of mainstream storytelling tropes in her previous feature, “The Fire Inside.”
By the same token, Qualley only needs a select few moments to sell us on the depth of Maya’s hurt; after watching the actress so tenderly allow her character to lower their guard during the first act of the story, the film’s mid-point gut-punch feels like it’s fringed with an edge of internal betrayal. How could she have done this to herself? When the action picks up a couple of years later, Maya is drunkenly bumming around Lisbon in sad girl lingerie and sleeping with anyone with a bed she can sneak out of before the sun comes up.
“Love of Your Life” is still fringed with an errant sense of romance even though Maya’s “solitary hedonism” phase is clearly meant to be a coping mechanism. To that point, Todd Banhazl is one of the few cinematographers good enough to not make you wish that Morrison had shot this herself, and his lush renderings of Portugal, London, New Orleans, and “Japan” are suffused with a rich emotionality that adds a welcome texture to some of the film’s more cut-and-dried psychologies.
It doesn’t take a wizard to make “Lanterns” star Aaron Pierre — speaking in his natural British accent, which is honestly just unfair — look like the first new stranger Maya might want to hook up with more than once, but it doesn’t hurt. By the same token, it doesn’t take someone charming enough to keep up with Kyle Chandler to play the second perfect man who wanders into Maya’s life, but this movie benefits a great deal from his earnest undeniability. It’s only because single dad Felix is so fucking eligible that Maya’s baggage affirms its weight. That she feels like a tourist in her own happiness.
From there, Cox’s script unfolds with a largely frictionless convenience, but it does in the service of making its way towards a believable and well-earned destination. While the ending is predictable enough from the moment you begin to realize that the movie’s title is referring to a habitual action rather than a noun phrase, its plaintive rhythms are pleasant in how they carry Maya through the years (title cards separate the story into ages, though the hideous khakis we see Qualley wear toward the end are the only indication we need that her character has reached a less vulnerable state), and there are still a handful of fun little shocks along the way — namely, the short-lived decision to style Patrick Schwarzenegger like a yassified Donald Trump Jr.
“Love of Your Life” has enough meat on the bone to make you wish that it had a little bit more, and Maya’s friendship with Jason — the basis for which is almost entirely formed off-screen — is among the more obvious places where the film might have benefitted from sinking a bit deeper into character detail. But this is a movie about growing up even when life makes you want to shrink into yourself and disappear, and its inexorable forward momentum is a force that Maya will eventually need to roll with rather than resist.
People come and people go, some for better reasons than others, but “Love of Your Life” convincingly finds a mottled beauty in the embrace of that churn, and in the everlasting hope it can breed. I don’t know if I agree with the kind old Portuguese woman who tells Maya that it’s lazy to be unhappy, but this sweet and sumptuous little drama offers a compelling argument that the only way to survive the loss of someone special is to savor the things they made you love about yourself.
Grade: B
“Love of Your Life” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Amazon MGM Studios will release it in theaters on Friday, October 7, and then make it available to stream on Prime Video on Friday, October 14.
English (US) ·