Margaret Qualley in Love of Your Life. Photograph: Chiabella James/Amazon Prime View image in fullscreen Margaret Qualley in Love of Your Life. Photograph: Chiabella James/Amazon Prime First look review Toronto film festival 2026 Review Love of Your Life review – Margaret Qualley eats, grieves and loves in Amazon’s transporting saga Toronto film festival: the actor gives one of her best performances to date in a smoothly made globe-trotting drama of a woman’s life after the loss of her husband
Benjamin Lee in Toronto Mon 14 Sep 2026 04.30 CEST Last modified on Mon 14 Sep 2026 04.31 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google There’s a jump scare about 30 minutes into the glossy romantic drama Love of Your Life that’s about as effective as anything you’ll see in a horror movie this year.
The film is focused on the life and loves of Maya (Margaret Qualley), a twentysomething Boston nurse who meet-cutes with the nerdy and idiosyncratic Felix (Gabriel Basso) during the purchase of a nightstand. We follow the initial giddy rush of their courting as they progress all the way to an impromptu wedding over the course of a few years, marked by Maya’s change in age announced in text. But just as we’re about to process the unsettling introduction of Felix using Chekhov’s inhaler, a news report interrupts the sunny tone. Spoiler: it’s March 2020.
Read more Rather like the ending of the otherwise anodyne romance Remember Me which shows Robert Pattinson’s character looking out of the World Trade Center on 9/11 (!), it’s revealed that we are in fact watching a Covid movie, at least for the first act, which ends, unsurprisingly, with the death of Felix. This then propels Maya on to an international odyssey from Portugal to England to Japan as she tries to figure out who she is without the man she thought she would grow old with (it involves what’s described as “solitary hedonism” AKA one-night stands with guys who have tattoos and croissants in the bath). That journey pushes her away from her best friend, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, and mother-in-law, played by Catherine Keener, and toward Aaron Pierre’s charming single father.
It’s Eat, Grieve, Love which is by no means a bad thing given how few mainstream films attempt to zero in on the vast lives of women both in and out of relationships (I remain a staunch defender of Ryan Murphy’s prettified yet emotionally resonant adaptation of a book I am otherwise unbothered by). There’s also a bit of How to Be Single (minus the bawdy humour), another film I’m often defending or at least drawing attention to and there’s something admirably ambitious about settling in with a female protagonist for such a long period of time to see how they live and learn after a loss many of us couldn’t imagine surviving.
The script was the subject of a heated auction back in 2024, sparking interest from studios like Paramount and unlikely names such as Taylor Sheridan, who usually prefers his female characters blond and hypersexual. It sold for $2m, a virtually unheard of amount for a spec script in this climate, recalling the mostly long-gone glory days of someone like Shane Black or Paul Verhoeven. It sold to Ryan Gosling, as producer, and Amazon and comes from the Nyad writer Julia Cox although it often feels like it was adapted from an elevated beach read.
It’s a sumptuous trip around the world and through the grieving process that’s mostly smooth sailing, steered by a director who knows how to fully transport us.…