Love of Your Life

OVERVIEW

[editor’s note: this review includes mild spoilers]

Every year, TIFF carries at least one film from the “woman in mourning” genre. These are films in which an attractive female lead suffers a deep tragedy either in the first act or before the film starts, and usually comes with an animal companion she inherits unwillingly. Her healing journey then runs in parallel with their mutual bonding, usually involving reconnecting with family and friends she pushed away in her moment of deepest suffering.

Love of Your Life, Rachel Morrison’s sophomore feature, may not have a Great Dane or a bird with broken wings, but otherwise fits perfectly into the subgenre. Margaret Qualley plays Maya, an introverted nurse who has learned to take care of herself from an early age. The product of a one-night stand, with a father she has never met and a mother who died too soon, Maya has her carefully established routine turned upside down when she meets Charlie after buying a piece of furniture from him. Stay alert to those Marketplace ads, ladies.

Everybody loves Charlie (Gabriel Basso), an angel in human form. Earnest and perfect in practically every imaginable way, he believes every word Maya says, as Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the only friend she has, points out. Charlie introduces her to his parents, including his mother (Catherine Keener), with whom Maya does not immediately connect. The two quickly marry, talk about having children, and then COVID strikes. The rest goes about as you would expect from my introduction.

BACKGROUND

Two years after earning a WGA nomination for Nyad, Julia Cox put her original screenplay on the market, prompting a six-studio bidding war that Amazon MGM won for a whopping $2 million, an impressive sum for a spec without major talent attached. The studio brought in cinematographer-turned-director Rachel Morrison, who had just made the Barry Jenkins-written The Fire Inside, which also premiered at TIFF but wasn’t exactly successful, and who now returns to the same festival with her second feature. With no star attached to the script, the lead became one of the most coveted roles in town, and it went to Margaret Qualley for a multi-country shoot. It gets a 7-day run in select theaters before moving to Prime Video.

THE REVIEW

It is hard to see what in Julia Cox’s screenplay inspired such fierce competition. That applies to the bidding war for the script, the interest surrounding its leading role, and the involvement of a filmmaker who made history as the first woman nominated for Best Cinematography at the Oscars. The Fire Inside wasn’t a great film, but it was far better than whatever this is.

It starts as a meet-cute, a Hallmark-level romance that occasionally borders on creepy but ultimately settles into something sweet. Then comes tragedy, followed by a destructive spiral and, eventually, the expected path toward healing. We take this journey with a truly excruciating protagonist, someone repeatedly shown to be deeply insensitive toward virtually everyone around her, whether it is her husband, her lifelong best friend, her mother-in-law, or people she has just met.

She doesn’t have an animal to care for, and perhaps she needs one, as the road to recovery is very rocky. After a destructive period in which she practically counts the days by the bottles she drinks, Maya meets Felix (Aaron Pierre, initially sporting an impressive Portuguese accent that quickly disappears once the actor apparently realizes it isn’t worth the effort), yet another angel in human form. The relationship leads her through dance classes, reckless behavior, and a European excursion filled with fancy meals, all meant to represent another stage in her recovery.

Letting grief make a protagonist selfish, unpleasant, or even cruel is difficult territory, but films like Young Adult and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri prove how rich and compelling that journey can be. Yet Love of Your Life puts its protagonist on a pedestal, surrounded by equally broken people whose pain is treated as secondary to her own. They largely absorb her behavior, with Maya’s suffering seemingly granting her permission to treat everyone terribly for as long as she wants and to apologize whenever she feels ready.

She, of course, looks great doing so. Even at her lowest, Margaret Qualley remains radiant, dressed in modern clothes and with immaculate hair. The actress handles the emotional demands well enough, including the film’s large supply of crying scenes, but never quite convinces as someone who has genuinely gained, then tragically lost, the spark in her life. Todd Banhazl’s cinematography doesn’t help, particularly during the European passages, which continuously capture the allure of their locations with little regard for the emotional state they are supposed to accompany. The lasting impact of watching a grieving protagonist wander through Portugal probably shouldn’t be the desire to book a trip there yourself.

The film becomes a full disaster in its final act, which turns into a procession of apologies not unlike the other terrible film of 2026, Outcome. By this point, the unconvincing character dynamics are impossible to ignore, with artificial performances (Schwarzenegger) sitting next to others that belong in a far better film (Keener). Maya’s climactic scene with Keener is undermined by a minor twist introduced to manufacture one last conflict and a jarring 180-degree cut that pulls you out of what should be the film’s most powerful and redemptive moment.

Basso’s Charlie deserved better. For someone whose presence and absence are meant to define Maya’s life, he is ultimately treated more as a narrative device than as a person worth mourning on his own terms. The screenplay neglects him completely while desperately begging us to pity its excruciating protagonist. Not to mention how the biggest tragedy of the 2020s is used as mere narrative convenience. Gross.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Love of Your Life approaches grief and healing with plenty of sentiment but remarkably little emotional honesty. Julia Cox’s screenplay builds its emotional journey around convenient tragedy and an excruciating protagonist whose insensitivity and selfishness are constantly excused. By the time the last act turns into a parade of apologies and easy forgiveness, whatever sympathy it expected from us is long gone.

Related films

‹ ›

The Fire Inside

★★★★★

Juror #2

★★★★★

A House of Dynamite

★★★★★

Blue Moon

★★★★★

Rebel Ridge

★★★★★