Love of Your Life review: A comforting handshake for a heart needing a hug

Love of Your Life review: A story of love, loss and the difficult business of healing, Rachel Morrison's film understands that grief never truly leaves us. But while Margaret Qualley's journey offers comfort to those learning to live with loss, the film leaves its promise only half-fulfilled.

In Short

• Love of Your Life explores grief, healing and love amid loss
• Maya, a nurse, struggles with grief after personal tragedy during COVID-19
• Film shows Maya's emotional journey from love to detachment

Grief is hard to accept, process and live with. Love can make it easier, or sometimes, infinitely more difficult. It depends on where you are in your grief, how much of yourself you have lost along the way, and whether your heart is ready to make room for anything new. But does grief ever really go away? Does life ever return to the way it was before? Perhaps, for some. Perhaps not. You never quite know the ways of life, or your own heart. And that is what makes grief such a compelling subject for cinema. It is a feeling we all understand, yet no two people experience it in quite the same way.

Rachel Morrison's Love of Your Life is the latest film to explore this complicated terrain.

A romantic film on paper, it is, at its heart, a story about healing, forgiveness and closure. It is also a film that will depend considerably on where you are in your own life when you watch it. For someone who has experienced loss, some of its moments might feel painfully familiar. For someone still learning to live with an absence, it might offer a little comfort. And for someone looking for a deeply moving exploration of grief, it might leave them wanting more.

The film begins with a meet-cute. Maya (Margaret Qualley), a nurse, meets Charlie (Gabriel Basso), and suddenly, the world seems a little sweeter. Things move quickly, and before you know it, the two have built a beautiful life together in a tiny Victorian apartment. When Charlie takes Maya home to meet his family, his mother, Ruth (Catherine Keener), is not entirely prepared for the woman who has entered her son's life. But there is something lovely about their romance, the sort of love story that makes friends gather around a couple and declare them the kind of people poems and legends are written about.

Everything feels like a dream. Until it doesn't.

The film takes us to the COVID-19 pandemic. Maya, now working on the frontlines, witnesses death almost every day. She nurses strangers, watches lives slip away and tries to keep going. Then, suddenly, her own world comes crashing down. The life she had so carefully built becomes a place she can no longer bear to inhabit.

Maya packs what she can into two suitcases and leaves. There is no grand plan, no considered itinerary, no clear destination. There is simply the need to be somewhere else, anywhere but where the memories live.

We meet her again three years later in Lisbon. The sweet, bubbly woman we first encountered has given way to someone almost unrecognisable. Dressed in dark clothes, with thick kohl framing her eyes, smoking, Maya drifts through unfamiliar streets, hooks up with strangers and keeps people at a safe emotional distance. She is still alive, of course, but living and just existing are two very different things. She has learnt how to get through her days without letting anyone get close enough to hurt her again.

And isn't that one of the cruellest things about grief? It does not always make us visibly sad. It can also make us indifferent. Sometimes, it makes us reckless too.

Maya meets Felix (Aaron Pierre), a handsome, charming man with his own history of loss. For a moment, we believe she might find her way back to happiness. Perhaps love can make things easier this time. Perhaps a new person, a new city and a new beginning can finally loosen grief's grip on her life. But healing is rarely that straightforward. You cannot outrun what you carry within you, no matter how many borders you cross.

Love of Your Life is a quiet film. It does not always spell out what its characters are feeling, and it often trusts silence to do the work of dialogue. There are moments when this approach pays off beautifully. At other times, however, the film's restraint slips into emotional tepidness. Its feelings are present, but they do not always reach the depth or warmth the story demands. It tugs at your heart in a handful of scenes, yet leaves much of its potential undercooked, its characters underwritten and its moments emotionally anaemic.

You find yourself wondering how Maya sustains her life as a travelling tele-nurse after leaving the hospital, how she manages to travel for years, and how much of her apparent independence is even financially possible. You wonder why she continues therapy while seeming determined to avoid the very connections that might help her heal. More importantly, you want to understand what happens between those therapy sessions and the occasional instruction offered by her therapist over a laptop screen. What does Maya actually do to get better? What does healing look like on the days when there is no handsome man, no beautiful landscape and no cinematic revelation to carry her forward?

These are not merely logistical questions. They are questions about the emotional labour of surviving loss. Grief is not a montage of beautiful locations and fleeting romances. It is the ordinary, often exhausting business of getting through a day - doing the same thing, meeting the same people.

The film could have spent more time with that reality.

Yet, for all its shortcomings, Love of Your Life deserves credit for attempting something more mature than the conventional romantic weepie. It is certainly more grown-up in its treatment of loss than P.S. I Love You, which ultimately uses the letters of a dead husband to guide his widow towards a new life. And unlike Eat Pray Love, it is not quite a story of self-discovery, in which travel becomes a means of finding oneself. Maya does not set out to discover who she is. She already knows who she was. What she does not know is how to be that person anymore.

Her journey is less about finding herself than about learning to build a life she never imagined she would have to live.

There is a meaningful difference between the two. Self-discovery suggests a destination, a revelation waiting somewhere along the way. Grief offers no such guarantees. You might travel across continents, fall in love again, make new friends and build a life that looks perfectly whole from the outside. And still, one song, one familiar smell or one ordinary afternoon can take you straight back to the moment everything changed.

That is why the film's final confrontation with Charlie's mother, Ruth, is among its most affecting moments.

For much of the story, Ruth represents a grief Maya cannot bear to face. Their loss is shared, but it is not identical.

When the two women finally face each other, the film briefly finds the emotional depth it has been searching for. Keener brings a remarkable complexity to Ruth, allowing love, anger, vulnerability and tenderness to coexist without making any of them feel acted out. There is no easy absolution here, no magical conversation that erases what happened or makes the years of pain disappear. Instead, there is the difficult possibility of two people acknowledging that they have been hurt in different ways by the same absence.

The scene allows the truths of two women on their own healing journeys to exist together.

If only the film had afforded the same depth to its other characters.

Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Maya's best friend, is particularly poorly written. He is an important link to her former life, someone who knew her before grief changed her, but the screenplay never gives him an identity beyond that function. His presence often feels less like that of a fully realised person than a narrative device, brought back into Maya's life when the story needs to remind her of the past she has abandoned.

We are told enough to understand his place in her life, but not enough to feel the full weight of their relationship. Consequently, the emotional stakes of their estrangement and eventual reconciliation never land as strongly as they should.

The same unevenness affects Maya's romance with Felix. Aaron Pierre brings an appealing warmth to the role, but their relationship often moves faster than the film's emotional logic can support. We understand why Maya might be drawn to someone who offers her the possibility of happiness without the memories attached to her old life. We are less convinced by the screenplay's ability to show us how that attraction develops into something meaningful.

It would, however, be unfair to dismiss Love of Your Life for what it fails to achieve without acknowledging what it gets right. Its greatest strength lies in recognising that grief is not a problem to be solved. There is no neat finish line. There are only days when the ache is less pronounced, when laughter comes a little more easily, when you realise you have gone an entire afternoon without thinking about the absence that once consumed every waking moment. And then there are days when it all comes rushing back.

Healing is not the absence of those days. It is learning that you can survive them.

At one point, Ruth tells Maya that "Grief is never finished. But neither is love" - and that sums up what the film really stands for. And that perhaps makes Love of Your Life worth watching, even when it does not always know how to make us feel everything it intends to.

It is not the finest film about grief, nor does it fully explore the emotional terrain it sets out to traverse. But there is something quietly comforting about a story that allows a woman to be messy, avoidant, frightened and occasionally selfish without suggesting that these things make her incapable of healing.

Love of Your Life is an idea about making life possible again, even with the pain still there.

The film is currently streaming on Prime Video.

- Ends