Spoilers ahead!
Love of Your Life tricks you. At first, cinematographer turned director Rachel Morrison’s sophomore feature plays out like a standard romantic drama as Maya (Margaret Qualley), a workaholic nurse, learns to lighten up when she meets the nerdy and charming Charlie (Gabriel Basso). The two fall in love instantly, quickly cementing their romance in an off-the-cuff wedding. Then, without warning, we learn it’s March 2020, and the lovers are thrust into the Covid-19 pandemic.
Maya and Charlie face the changes head-on, with Maya working long hours at the hospital and worrying she will bring home the virus — particularly concerning given Charlie’s asthma. Then comes the shocking twist (and spoiler for those who haven’t yet watched): about a third of the way into the film, Charlie dies.
The tonal shift, which both Julia Cox’s script and Morrison’s direction present matter-of-factly, is designed to devastate anyone anticipating a standard whirlwind romance. Instead, Love of Your Life offers a delicate study of grief and the necessary but seemingly impossible process of moving on after a sudden, devastating loss. This beautifully shot film, premiering in theaters October 7 ahead of its Amazon Prime Video streaming launch on October 14, tackles the turbulent reality and unpredictability of our lives. It’s a tender story about finding yourself in the fallout.
“What was so special about Charlie and about Maya’s relationship was, Charlie was the person that opened her up,” Qualley tells Bazaar ahead of the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere on September 13. “She’d been this guarded person [with] the feeling that the only person she could rely on was herself. Suddenly, somebody opened her up, and then she lost that person. She reverted to her old ways. Everyone deals with grief differently, and it’s at once so personal and so universal. It lit up the darkest, most scared parts of herself and let those parts drive, becoming a very insular experience.”
Although the pandemic plays a pivotal role in the story, it would be wrong to classify Love of Your Life as a “pandemic movie.” In her script, Cox presents 2020 as a moment that changed everything, not understating its universally devastating impact but still treating it as a passing crucible. Rather, the film narrows in on Maya’s psyche.
To prepare for the role, Qualley interviewed nurses who worked in emergency rooms during the first days of the pandemic. “These mostly women nurses that I was talking to — the way that they would not only feel responsible for somebody’s literal medical health, they feel responsible for their mental well-being and trying to cheer them up, trying to serve bad news with a smile, trying to give hope in these moments that feel hopeless,” she says. These conversations inform Maya’s distress and her devastation when Charlie contracts the virus and passes away. She’s already buckling under the pressure of witnessing so much loss, and this personal tragedy breaks her. We then leave the pandemic behind as fast as it’s introduced, zeroing in on Maya’s collapse, which manifests as avoidance when she cuts off all ties and flees the country.
Charlie appears in only the first third of the film, so Basso needed to leave an impression as the titular love of Maya’s life. “Gabe was such a perfect casting for Charlie because Gabe has this really unique presence — he’s incapable of lying — and to have that be the person that she feels like sees her and disarms her, I think was meant to be,” Qualley says.
Basso assumed he wouldn’t get the part because he didn’t match the initial descriptives: long-haired, lanky, optimistic. But when the chemistry read with Qualley clicked, the filmmakers cared more about that connection than those characteristics, which “goes to show what they wanted to get with this movie was very grounded and real,” he says.
On top of this, Basso tells Bazaar a children’s book he penned about grief informed the way he thought about the story: “The protagonist loses his dog. He’s a kid, and he keeps going back to the same location to talk to this dog who has essentially passed on. Now, he’s trapped in this magical grove of trees, and the dog essentially says, ‘I’ve already felt what it’s like to be loved by you. You need to go give that to others too.’ Ultimately, not returning to the same point of grief, not dumping more energy into that nonreciprocal relationship, but also not letting that take away from the reality that the relationship was enriching. It was a beautiful thing, and now it’s gone. To keep going back and keep revisiting that wound and pouring energy into it is to do others in your life a disservice, because they don’t get to feel that love that you’re applying now to something that’s lost.”
That philosophy sits at the heart of Love of Your Life — a film less concerned with the mechanics of loss than with the courage it takes to love again after everything has fallen apart.
