‘Love of Your Life’ Review: Margaret Qualley Eats, Grieves and Loves in an Unpersuasive Romantic Travelogue

After decades of stellar work, cinematographer Rachel Morrison finally got her big break with Dee Rees’ sophomore feature Mudbound. In 2018, Morrison became the first woman ever to be nominated by the Academy Awards for best cinematography. She then parlayed that acclaim — and acclaim for her continued collaborations with Ryan Coogler — into a directorial pivot. In 2024, she made the deeply sincere sports biopic The Fire Inside. With a script from director Barry Jenkins, Morrison crafted a classic underdog story with strong performances and a feel-good ending.

Now, two years later, she’s back with Love of Your Life, a narratively ambitious story of romance, heartbreak and self-discovery. The film follows Maya (Margaret Qualley), an independent ER nurse who falls hard for Charlie (Gabriel Basso), a lovable nerd she meets by chance one fateful afternoon. It’s the kind of meet-cute that only happens in movies — from the moment Charlie sees Maya, he’s in love. He looks at her with all the expectation of building a life together. But Maya is a loner and hesitant toward the idea of being part of a family. Maya’s fear of being introduced to Charlie’s family is indeed an early conflict — she says she’s too exhausted from work to meet them but Charlie calls out her avoidant behavior for what it is.

We learn that Maya was conceived from a one-night stand and that her mother never wanted her. She’s never counted on the idea of family. And yet, when Charlie meets Maya’s best friend Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger), that’s what they become. Charlie and Jason take to each other immediately, and for a short time the three enjoy a harmonious existence together in Boston.

Then, at Charlie’s 30th birthday party, they surprise his mother Ruth (Catherine Keener) with a wedding in their apartment. Maya and Charlie’s wedding night is among the best scenes in the film, revealing their deeply intimate connection both physically and emotionally. It’s rare to see Qualley this relaxed on screen— her chemistry with Basso feels as easy as it looks, with a casual sexuality that’s refreshing during such a sexless time in mainstream American cinema.

But once reality begins to pierce the dream of Maya and Charlie’s marriage, Love of Your Life starts to come undone. In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, Maya struggles to maintain the beauty and optimism Charlie’s presence brought into her life. Though he has asthma, Charlie refuses to be separated from his nurse wife even as she spends every day exposed to the devastating respiratory disease. In one scene, the couple turns up the music while the sound of ambulance sirens floods the streets.

Their insistence on remaining in a honeymoon state in the face of tragedy should be relatable. We all struggled through lockdown, trying to maintain our sanity and human connections in the face of mass death and a government too tied to individualism and conservatism to implement measures that could have saved lives early on. But this is a fictional romance, and in practice we are watching two beautiful young middle-class white people try to insulate themselves from a global, real-life health crisis. Regardless, it doesn’t work, and soon Charlie is infected and Maya thrust back into the world as a young widow.

Love of Your Life transforms into a mourning vacation, as Maya leaves her new family behind to drink, eat and f*ck her way through years of her life, doing telehealth to pay the bills. It’s here that Julia Cox’s script completely loses touch with any emotional reality. Maya insists that Charlie was the special one, the one who made life easy and fun. But she seems to float through the world as a beautiful damsel who tries to disappear but can’t seem to avoid being the center of attention.

Morrison and Cox are presumably trying to tell a story of a woman turning away as the world beckons her to live on, but there’s something phony and too glossy about everything that happens to Maya. She meets Felix (Aaron Pierre) in Lisbon, falls for him and has a sexy, luxurious romance. By the time she follows him home to London, the horrors of COVID-19 are simply a hazy memory. We know Maya is running away from her problems, and the film goes right along with her, parting from reality and any emotional resonance it had before.

By the time Maya is forced to confront her past, Qualley has lost her grip on the character. The more time we spend with her, the less alive she seems. Love of Your Life settles awkwardly into an empty film with beautiful images devoid of meaning. Maya’s fear of commitment mirrors the film’s fear of showing us anything truly ugly or grappling with the idea that our heroine is one of many, many people who lost someone during a society-shattering number of years. When the movie finally acknowledges this with an affecting reunion scene between Qualley and Keener, it’s too little too late.