Once again Margaret Qualley excels in a moving, topical and delicately profound mosaic of oscillating emotion.
The other side of hope: Margaret Qualley and Gabriel Basso
Image courtesy of Amazon Media.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
The worst thing about Rachel Morrison’s second directorial feature is its title. It sounds like a waft of romantic candyfloss one might well stumble across on Amazon Prime. At first, it even plays like that, but the film – from an original screenplay by Julia Cox (Nyad) – is so, so much more. For a start, Margaret Qualley takes centre stage, which is never a bad thing, and this is probably her best performance to date, in which she embodies several stages of the same character, a woman who is just trying to get from A to B in an uncertain world. She is terrific. The film is also set in a myriad of locations which, in order to preserve its own cinéma-vérité, Morrison spares us any screen-battering captions. There is London, which doesn’t really look like London, but certainly feels like London; there’s Lisbon, the Algarve, Spain, Boston, Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, and New Orleans, the last-named feeling the most like the city it’s filmed in (it’s hard to resist that Spanish moss and an alligator).
At the outset, we see Maya in her blue scrubs travelling on the MBTA transit, before going about her business at Boston General, checking on her computer, chatting with staff and caring for patients, while Sharon Van Etten’s ‘Seventeen’ plays soothingly on the soundtrack. Then, still in her scrubs, she walks down a Boston street to pick up a second-hand nightstand, which she purchases from Charlie (Gabriel Basso) for $75. She then carries the piece of furniture back down the street, instantly establishing Maya as an independent, can-do kind of woman. Qualley is good at playing these sorts of characters, as she did in the Netflix series Maid and as Cima, the former physician in The Dog Stars. She looks like she could fix a carburetor. Back home, Maya opens a drawer of the nightstand and discovers an audio tape, a small discovery that colludes into turning her life around. Sometimes it’s the smallest things…
There are a lot of small things in Love of Your Life, moments that distinguish this character study, lifting it from a love story and into a contemplation of self-pity, grief, mental health, cowardice, culpability and a bunch of life-arresting, life-changing events. The first few bars of this human sonata feel familiar, ordinary even, and while Morrison’s eloquent direction keeps us engaged – Qualley and Basso make an irresistible couple – we know it cannot last. And so the emotional gears click into a higher register as Maya is transformed into someone else, an unanchored soul attempting to escape her own destiny. Then, at a dance class in Portugal of all places, she meets an elderly woman (the 86-year-old Isabel Ruth) who takes her out for a drink and is prepared to listen, carefully. Clocking Maya’s self-conscious despondency, she says in her faltering English, “don’t choose to be unhappy. It’s lazy.” Moments like these – there are many – bring a subtle poignancy, a wisdom, to a poetic meditation on the trip-wires of the adult condition, the film gliding effortlessly through the years to the story’s natural conclusion. Being a former cinematographer (she lit the films Fruitvale Station, Mudbound, Black Panther and Seberg), Morrison inevitably brings a vast visual elegance to her work, which Qualley inhabits so convincingly. Maya finally realises that you can find hope in the most unexpected places. It’s not that dissimilar to discovering a gem like this on Amazon Prime.
Cast: Margaret Qualley, Aaron Pierre, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Basso, Catherine Keener, Tamara Lawrance, Corey Johnson, Isabel Ruth, Amanda Root.
Dir Rachel Morrison, Pro Ryan Gosling and Jessie Henderson, Screenplay Julia Cox, Ph Todd Banhazl, Pro Des Laura Ellis Cricks, Ed Jennifer Vecchiarello, Music Dustin O'Halloran, Costumes Jill Taylor.
Open Invite Entertainment/Amazon MGM Studios/General Admission-Amazon Media.
111 mins. USA. 2026. UK and US Rel: 14 October 2026. Cert. 15.
