Love of Your Life (2026) Review: Qualley Shines — But the Film Around Her Doesn't Earn the Tears

Rachel Morrison's second feature splits critics right down the middle: a career performance from Margaret Qualley inside a story some call deeply moving and others call glossy and phony.

Love of Your Life is a two-part love story that uses its structure as its whole argument: a Boston nurse named Maya (Margaret Qualley) falls into an all-consuming marriage with Charlie (Gabriel Basso), and when he dies, the film jumps forward to follow her rebuilding a life as a grieving expat in Lisbon, where she meets Felix (Aaron Pierre). Director Rachel Morrison — making just her second feature after 2018's Mudbound — and the script are asking a specific question: can a person love fully a second time without betraying the first love, and is grief something you get over or something you carry into whatever comes next. Catherine Keener and Patrick Schwarzenegger round out the supporting cast.

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Qualley is doing the real work here

Every review of this film, positive or negative, agrees on one thing: Margaret Qualley is excellent, and several critics are calling it the best work of her career so far. Awards Radar's review states flatly that she "has never been better," praising how she plays Maya's grief not as a single note of sadness but as something that leaks into ordinary moments — unlocking a door, ordering coffee — without the film needing to underline it. The AV Club's review similarly centers its praise on Qualley, describing the film as a "refreshingly grown-up romance" that works mainly because she sells both halves of Maya's life as the same person changed by loss, rather than two different characters wearing the same face.

Where the film loses the critics who don't buy it

The split shows up in how reviewers describe everything around Qualley. TheWrap and several other outlets land on the opposite side, arguing the film's visual polish — cinematographer Todd Banhazl shot across Portugal, London, Tokyo and New Orleans — ends up working against it, calling the result "phony and glossy" in a way that undercuts the grief story it's trying to tell. Roger Ebert's site goes further, titling its review "Forgettable drama doesn't trust its audience" and arguing the script keeps restating its own themes in dialogue instead of letting the performances carry them. The throughline in the negative reviews isn't that the romance is poorly cast — nobody disputes Qualley or Basso — it's that the film's handsome, globe-trotting production design reads as a travel-brochure gloss over material that would hit harder with less polish.

The structure is the film's biggest swing

Splitting the story into a pre-loss marriage and a post-loss rebuilding, rather than telling it in a single linear chronology, is the film's most ambitious choice and also its most divisive. High on Films' review calls it "a soapy melodrama that spins out emotional truth and patient romance," suggesting the two-part structure earns its patience; other reviews read the same structure as a device that lets the film avoid dealing with Charlie's death directly, cutting away from the hardest part of Maya's grief rather than sitting in it. Either way, the back half in Lisbon — built around Maya and Felix's slower, warier courtship — is where most critics agree the film finds its most grounded scenes, even those who otherwise found the film overlong.

Is it worth streaming it tonight

At 106 minutes and now streaming on Prime Video for no additional cost beyond a subscription, Love of Your Life is a low-risk watch for anyone who wants a star vehicle built specifically to showcase Margaret Qualley, and the reviews back that specific pitch regardless of which side of the critical split they land on. It's a harder recommendation for anyone allergic to grief-romance melodrama or glossy destination cinematography used as emotional shorthand — the 79% Rotten Tomatoes score from 24 reviews reflects a film critics respected more than they universally loved, with the gap between the two camps consistently tracing back to how much a given viewer is willing to let the film's visual beauty stand in for its characters' interior lives.

The bottom line

Love of Your Life is worth watching for Margaret Qualley alone, in a performance several critics are already calling a career high; whether the film surrounding her earns its own tears is the question reviewers can't agree on, and that split — not the quality of its lead performance — is the most accurate thing to know going in.