REVIEW: ‘Love Of Your Life’ Is A Raw Look At Falling Apart

The cast list for Love of Your Life and its opening act immediately makes it seem like the next great romantic comedy. Despite using the archetypes and structure of a rom-com, this isn’t a story about falling in love so much as it is about falling apart. 

Directed by Rachel Morrison and written by Julia Cox, Love of Your Life spans years of Maya’s life (Margaret Qualley), through love, tragedy, and her journey to figure out what comes next. The film starts with a meet-cute when Maya goes to buy a nightstand and meets a professor at MIT named Charlie (Gabriel Basso). That chance meeting grows into a romance that shines in the film’s first act.

As an emergency room nurse, Maya is used to being alone. She’s pragmatic and, for most of her life, never thought about marraige or kids, and then she met Charlie. We spend the first 30 minutes of the film seeing their love and their life unfold. We see their high points; we meet Charlie’s family; we learn about Maya’s loneliness. More importantly, we see how much they have changed each other. 

Prime Video’s Love of Your Life gives the year’s best romance in just one act.

When you meet the love of your life, it’s the little ways they open up your world, and Love of Your Life understands that. In just the first act, it’s easy to fall in love with the love that Maya and Charlie share. He brings a brightness and levity to Maya’s life, and he also brings a romantic view of the world.

Really, though, she is his world, and he is hers, and after years of building a life together and getting ready to start a family, it’s all taken away. Love of Your Life is one of the few thoughtful looks at the COVID pandemic and the trauma and grief it left in its wake for everyone, especially healthcare workers.

As lockdown hits Boston, Maya is stuck in the ER. She works long hours, doesn’t take time off, and every day she talks with patients and their families through their worst moments. 

In the healthcare system, Maya is sometimes the only person a patient sees before they’re intubated. With no family allowed, the isolation rings through the halls as we see Maya barely keeping it together. She knows the risk she is taking by coming home every night to her husband, but despite her pushing to leave, he doesn’t want to leave her alone. 

Margaret Qualley’s Maya is a deep look at love and loss. 

When the other shoe drops and the film transitions between acts, the crushing weight of grief makes Maya collapse. As the audience, we watch Maya’s life crumble, and her sense of self fade away. She couldn’t save him; they will never get to be parents; they won’t grow old; and all Maya has left is survivor’s guilt and the other guilt. 

The sharp crash after the romance builds up hurts to watch. We may have just sat through a prolonged and fleshed-out montage of a couple’s life, but in that time, the film captures your heart. It holds you because we see the couple’s vulnerabilities and how much they love each other.

Unable to deal with the loss, Maya leaves. She packs up without a word and leaves her mother-in-law cursing her name, hoping to get a response. When we catch up with Maya, she’s living out the plan she and Charlie made for after the pandemic. What has started as a joke about running away turned into a plan to adventure. Only now, she’s drinking in excess, sleeping with any man she meets, and working telehealth while living abroad. 

Love of Your Life isn’t about falling in love; it’s about falling apart.

Maya is alive, but the life that she is living is hollowed out. When Charlie died, he took the spark for life that he had ignited in her when they started dating. She’s living out their travel plans, but really, she’s just going through the motions. Maya looks uncomfortable in every situation we see her in. 

Deep in grief, it’s clear that her road is numbing the wound to ignore it, not working to heal it. The Maya we meet in Europe is far from the woman we knew in the film’s first act. While she abandoned her life in Boston with no notice, the grief didn’t cripple her; it just reshaped her, hardening her and compartmentalizing the trauma, just like she was trained to do. 

But when Maya meets a man named Felix (Aaron Pierre) in Portugal, something starts to stir again. What should have been a one-night stand turns into something more. Slowly, and then all at once, Maya starts to feel again. Without a second thought, she gives in. Dinners, dates, intimacy, and then all of a sudden, living together. 

With Felix, Maya feels safe, but much of that is because he doesn’t ask her to change. He doesn’t ask her for more than she is willing to give and waits for her to do it on her own. Whether it’s her heart or coming with him to London, Felix’s own grief story gives insight into the pain that Maya is living with. But more importantly, he understands that the cracks loss forms will never be smoothed over. 

Maya’s grief isn’t linear. She isn’t always crying; she isn’t getting over Charlie’s death. She’s just living, and in many ways, Felix’s behavior and kindness mirror Charlie’s impact on Maya’s life. But when things get really serious, Maya’s grief raises its head.

The terrifying feeling she feels about something happening to the people she loves is love, expressing itself. But with Charlie gone, she understands that cavernous pain all too well. And again, she leaves. 

Aaron Pierre’s Felix is a grounding presence in the film. 

Throughout our time with Maya, we know that she’s in therapy. We also know that she’s struggling through it, closing off pieces of herself and the process. The destructive path she walks comes from her love; the pain she endures does, too, but she doesn’t know how to live with and accept life’s fleeting nature. 

 Love of Your Life’s third act is closure, not healing. When Maya is finally ready to make amends, now years after Charlie’s death, it isn’t easy. She cut off every part of her life that she shared with Charlie, and now, she’s starting to make her way back to it. Maya returns to the United States, even though she’s settled down in Europe. Now, she’s speaking on her pain and the weight that the world asked healthcare workers to carry during COVID. 

The destruction is gone, but the world has changed since she decided to abandon it. Her best friend Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who spoke at her impromptu apartment wedding, is the first step in making amends. Jason was like a brother to her, someone she loved and spent holidays with. And then she was gone. 

Grief is the love left behind, but that in and of itself is devastating.

Making her way back to him is also choosing to finally see the world without Charlie. Previously, she was living a life in all of the places that he never made it to. Without heavy exposition, Love of Your Life chronicles grief that erupts, dampens, heals, but still hurts. Grief becomes a piece of her, and all of the complexities that the word we’ve given to the process of losing people we love exist throughout the film. 

We see the pain, the sadness, the isolation, and the guilt, but we also see the joy her memories bring, and the calm she finds when she plays that old cassette tape from their first date. But more importantly, we understand how listening to that tape has transformed her life. From swimming in anger and guilt, from the numbness to loving again, Maya’s life is driven by grief. 

Then Maya meets her mother-in-law. Having abandoned the family in their hour of need, the hostility is palpable at first. But so is the hurt and the love that makes the emotions all so raw.

Love of Your Life isn’t about getting better or letting go. Much of the film is spent exploring Maya falling apart. But because it is, the film winds up being one of the best examples of the messiness of grief, and how much it steals from us if we let it. 

Margaret Qualley delivers on of her best performances in Love of Your Life. 

Love of Your Life’s ending brings it all home. Its main message is one that matters and one that any audience member knows is all too real if they’ve lost anyone that they love. We don’t have a life after grief; we just live with it. It’s in our bones, our brain, our dreams; grief is everywhere. But it’s just another emotion that comes with love. 

To feel so gutted by loss is to understand just how deeply you loved and were loved in return. There is much about Love of Your Life that feels like standard genre fare. But every now and again, it takes a risk and looks into the mess of one of life’s most complicated emotions, and finds something unique. 

An original story, screenwriter Julia Cox has tapped into something wholly human, devastating and beautiful with Love of Your Life. Maya is not okay, and a part of her never will be. But that is okay. As much as she thinks about a totally different life that she could have had, one where she grows old with the love of her life, where they have a family, that isn’t reality. But now, after she’s fallen apart, it’s time to pull it back together. 

Love of Your Life is streaming now, exclusively on Prime Video.