At this point, I don’t need much more than Margaret Qualley (The Substance) on a poster. I’ve followed her since The Leftovers, still one of the best shows of the century, and it’s been a pleasure watching everyone else catch up. Between Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Poor Things, and The Substance, she kept showing up in films I really liked. Even The Dog Stars, which didn’t work for me back in August, had her carrying grief with a lightness that never felt fake. She’s genuinely becoming an A-lister. If she’s in a movie, I’m watching it because of her.
Actually, that’s honestly most of why Love of Your Life was on my list. The names behind the camera didn’t hurt. Rachel Morrison (Mudbound) is a cinematographer first, the one who shot Black Panther, and I still think it holds up tremendously. This is her second feature as a director. The script comes from Julia Cox, and what stayed with me from Nyad was how natural its dialogue felt, even while the film around it played every biopic card in the deck. Something similar happens here.
Love of Your Life starts the way a lot of romantic comedies start. Maya (Qualley) is a nurse in Boston who buys a secondhand desk from Charlie (Gabriel Basso, Hillbilly Elegy), a chatty guy with an easy charm. Things move fast between them. Soon they’re married and building a life, with her best friend Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger, Echo Valley) still in the picture and Charlie’s mother, Ruth (Catherine Keener, Get Out), part of the family. Then that future gets upended, and Maya does what everyone tells you not to do. She leaves. New continent, new routine, no contact with anyone from before. Across several years and a few countries, including a chance connection with Felix (Aaron Pierre, Rebel Ridge), the movie follows her as she tries to figure out whether she can ever let anyone back in.
For its first few minutes, this could be any rom-com. The meet-cute is there, the flirting is there, and then the film basically stops doing rom-com things. It isn’t one, not even close. What caught me off guard was the timing. The story is set right before COVID hits, which works almost like a twist, and once you notice the date, the whole romance carries this uneasy feeling of people who have no idea what’s coming. When the pandemic does arrive, Love of Your Life shows the chaos from inside the hospital, through the eyes of a nurse who keeps going to work while everything around her falls apart.
Most of it rests on Qualley, and she doesn’t just carry it. She elevates it significantly. Maya deals with an insurmountable sadness by stepping away from everything and everyone, and that could easily make her impossible to root for. Qualley never begs for sympathy, and she never loses it either. She plays the sadness quiet, mostly through what Maya avoids. I believed every bit of it. Maya isn’t trying to heal at first. She’s trying to get through the day without feeling anything, which is a very different thing.
I’ve seen Love of Your Life called surface-level, and I don’t think that’s quite fair, at least not when it comes to the process of mourning. There’s a specific expectation with these films. People want to walk out with a life-changing story, or a monologue, or even a single sentence, like that WandaVision line everyone keeps sharing, something that rewires how they understand a subject this complex and this sensitive. When a movie doesn’t hand them that, it’s “surface-level.” Then, when the dialogue goes deep and explicit, and the characters share exactly what they’re feeling, that becomes the complaint instead. Those two criticisms feel contradictory to me.
For me, the film does go beyond the surface, mostly through its conversations. They feel honest and authentic, people finally saying the thing they’ve been holding in, with tons of tears from the characters and, I’m sure, from a lot of viewers. Keener gets the best of them. She has less screen time than any of the men and still walks away with the most powerful moments in the movie, a couple of them emotionally devastating. She doesn’t need long. After all, Ruth is Charlie’s mother, and that’s all I’ll say about her.
Basso and Pierre are both pretty good as the two men Maya falls for, and her chemistry with each of them is on point. The problem is that the men in this film are a little too perfect to be true, especially Felix. He’s understanding about absolutely everything, patient with every wall Maya puts up, and at some point he stops feeling like a person and starts feeling like what the story needs him to be.
What I really like is that Love of Your Life avoids the easy trap of swapping one romance for another and calling it a day. New guy shows up, magic happens, the end. Life just isn’t that simple, and the movie knows it. I loved the double meaning of the title too. At first it points to a person, the one you’re supposed to find. As the story goes on, it points more and more at Maya’s own life, the thing she has to learn to love again. That takes time, and the film lets it take time. In fact, time is the closest thing we’ll ever get to a “cure” for loss.
Morrison’s direction is light, and Cox’s writing is empathetic, which is a big part of why the movie earns its tears. That said, it’s also a bit too polished. Todd Banhazl (Hustlers) shoots it beautifully, but the traveling looks a bit like a travel ad, everything bright and saturated, for a woman who isn’t feeling colorful at all. Maybe that’s deliberate, the brightness being what Maya tells herself to keep moving. I’m still not sure the film means it that way.
Underneath the story, the themes, and the performances, it’s still pretty formulaic and generic. Strip it down, and you can call most of the big beats before they arrive. The middle gets repetitive, circling Maya’s insecurities and her loopy nights out more times than it needs to. And a few lines are clearly there to push for tears. Most of the dialogue feels genuine… just not all of it.
Final Thoughts on Love of Your Life
Love of Your Life is a tender grief drama dressed up as a romance, and Margaret Qualley carries it, lifting it well above what it would be without her. It opens like a rom-com and refuses to become one, and seeing the pandemic through a nurse’s eyes gives the story real weight. The conversations feel honest, Catherine Keener is devastating with very little screen time, and I especially loved that it’s about relearning to love life rather than replacing one love with another. It’s still formulaic underneath and a tad too polished, but I still liked it more than enough.
Rating: B
Love of Your Life released on Prime Video on October 14th.
Learn more about the film, including how to watch it, at the official website for the title.
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