Margaret Qualley Grieves and Shines in Amazon's Love of Your Life

Margaret Qualley delivers one of her best performances to date in Love of Your Life, Amazon's transporting saga of a woman's life after the loss of her husband. That's the strongest fact here, and it's the one the film hangs on.

The Guardian's review, published 13 September from the Toronto festival, calls the film a "smoothly made globe-trotting drama of a woman's life after the loss of her husband." Smooth is doing honest work in that sentence. This is a machine-well-oiled production, not an experiment.

What happens 30 minutes in?

There's a jump scare about 30 minutes into this glossy romantic drama. The review's verdict: it's "about as effective as anything you'll see in a horror movie this year." A romance out-scares the horror genre. That's either a compliment or an indictment of this year's horror crop. Possibly both.

The setup is classical. Maya, a twentysomething Boston nurse played by Qualley, meet-cutes with Charlie, a nerdy and idiosyncratic figure played by Gabriel Basso, during the purchase of a nightstand. Furniture as matchmaker. It's the kind of premise that either charms or grates, and the review leans toward the former.

The courtship runs through its giddy initial rush and arrives, over the course of a few years, at an impromptu wedding. The film marks time by announcing Maya's age in on-screen text. A device as old as the medium, deployed without apology.

Why does March 2020 matter?

Just as the viewer is processing an unsettling introduction — Charlie using Chekhov's inhaler, a screenwriting term for an object planted early to be used later — a news report interrupts the sunny tone. The review's spoiler is blunt: it's March 2020.

That date is the film's structural hinge. Everything sunny before it becomes retrospective grief after it. The pandemic arrives not as backdrop but as plot, the news broadcast functioning as the horror beat the review singles out.

Does Qualley carry it?

The review credits Qualley with eating, grieving and loving across the film's span — the full register of a life after loss. It names her turn as one of her best to date, which sets a high bar given her recent run of acclaimed work.

Gabriel Basso's Charlie is the film's engine of charm: nerdy, idiosyncratic, and doomed by the genre's own grammar. The inhaler tells you what the tone shift will confirm. Chekhov's rules are strict, and this screenplay follows them.

Love of Your Life screened at Toronto and reaches audiences via Amazon. A glossy studio romance that weaponizes a date everyone remembers is a gamble; on this evidence, it's one that pays off.