Rachel Morrison’s Love of Your Life might be the first Hollywood movie to meaningfully reckon with the COVID-19 pandemic. American studios have largely ignored this harrowing world event, and with reason, since all of us needed a distraction from the horrors of the world during a time when most of us were locked into our homes. However, in the fallout of COVID, most of the privileged members of contemporary society have decided to ignore that it ever happened in the first place, almost as if the two-year period when millions were severely infected, permanently disabled, or died from the disease never existed. Hollywood movies such as Doug Liman’s Locked Down or Judd Apatow’s The Bubble mocked the era, but the pandemic’s real human cost and suffering have been largely ignored.
It’s kind of incredible to see how the word COVID almost acts like a deterrent for dinner-table conversations, because many of us have refused to process the trauma that such an event occurred. Morrison and screenwriter Julia Cox aren’t afraid to remind audiences of what happened within the households of millions of vulnerable people worldwide, and how one event permanently altered who they are as human beings. What’s smartest about the screenplay is how it lightly suggests elements that seem trivial, without highlighting them, until they become integral to how the plot is set in motion.
Case in point: Maya (Margaret Qualley) is a frontline nurse at a hospital in Boston, and the titular love of her life, Chris (Gabriel Basso), has asthma. The film begins before COVID exists, so no one bats an eye at these traits. After all, being a nurse isn’t uncommon, and asthma isn’t a rare medical condition. It’s only when the two see a news report on television that the United States has detected its fifteenth case of COVID that one sees where this is going – Maya has to work endless shifts at the hospital and inevitably catches the disease. Her case is mild, but Chris’ condition puts him in a debilitating state, which sadly leads to his death almost as soon as he is hospitalized and intubated.
Morrison and Cox don’t trivialize COVID, nor exploit it for their own dramatic purposes. They show a reality Hollywood has been afraid to reckon with since the pandemic began, whose traumas still linger in our memories. They show a burgeoning couple, passionately in love with one another, thinking they will live their best lives together, until a worldwide event affects them despite all the precautions they can take. The first half-hour or so of Love of Your Life feels relatively mundane and banal, until Morrison presents this shift with genuine humanism and compassion for the characters she’s depicting on screen, because this reality was sadly all too common at the height of the crisis.
The film then shifts to four years post-COVID, with Maya having given up her nursing job and dedicating herself entirely to telehealth. She has also moved to Portugal, unable to confront her best friend Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Chris’ mother, Ruth (Catherine Keener), who directly blames Maya for getting her son sick and dying. Attempting to ignore the harsh nightmares that she has lived through, but that are still so present every time she closes her eyes, Maya meets the ineffably suave Felix (Aaron Pierre), and the two immediately hit it off. By that point, the film takes relatively formulaic directions, but Morrison’s directing is far stronger in this sophomore outing than in her debut feature, 2024’s The Fire Inside. There’s more confidence behind the camera as she captures Maya’s journey of self-actualization through her most important decades.
It can often feel like Love of Your Life isn’t leading to anything meaningful, but it’s actually the most emotive Qualley has ever been. Her performance is a complicated tightrope to walk, especially as she loses the love of her life and represents a post-pandemic world that has moved on, ignoring the human cost of the pandemic and pretending nothing happened, while Maya is stuck in a perpetual state of anguish. The immense toll it must take to wake up every day, knowing you gave the love of your life a disease that has killed him, is too overwhelming to bear, but Qualley represents each facet of the performance with so much raw vulnerability that it becomes so easy to latch onto a reality that most have ignored and continue to do so. The fact that the film is so openly discussing – and, most importantly, acknowledging – the scars of the pandemic is the main reason why Qualley’s performance is so layered and represents a pain that the privileged who have never been personally affected by COVID refuse to even talk about.
The rest of the movie is relatively rudimentary in structure, although Aaron Pierre’s allure is so charming that one wonders why Maya would even doubt starting a relationship with one of the most charismatic screen presences on the planet. The second smartest thing about Cox’s screenplay is how it rarely falls into the trappings of most romantic dramas, where Maya learns to live again through a newfound romance. Her connection with Felix isn’t purely romantic, and when she realizes this, Love of Your Life opens up in a surprisingly affecting way. It also helps that Morrison, first and foremost a cinematographer, knows how to visually represent Maya’s anguish through reserved facial expressions that seemed hard to pull off for Qualley before working with a director who is still learning to collaborate with high-caliber talent but knows how to frame a face.
That face is the defining guiding force of a film that isn’t afraid to be so open about a subject that few of us want to revisit. It’s a face that so many people who have lost a loved one during one of the most challenging times in human history know and feel deep within them. Maya’s conversation with Ruth at the end of the film, as they reflect on a time they’d like to wipe from their memory, is so heartbreaking that it will hopefully remind audiences of the barbarity and inhumanity many people lived through. They will carry some of their most painful, agonizing memories for the rest of their lives, and Earth is still turning, and most of us have decided to put this dark chapter in the rearview mirror. However, we should talk about it instead of ignoring it. Maybe this film could act as the first step in our acknowledgment of the lives lost and permanently changed by this harrowing, once-in-a-generation event, that we hope won’t happen anytime soon…
