Hollywood, like America, has mostly tried to forget Covid ever existed. Over the last six years, there have been a bare handful of films explicitly set during the height of the pandemic, and even fewer that’ve used it as an explicit theme or plot point. As far as I know, there have been none until now that turn on a Covid death.
Rachel Morrison’s The Love of Your Life is a remarkable film for many reasons, but a central one is that it breaks that silence. The movie’s in many respects a familiar, if affecting, portrait of grief. But by making Covid central to its plot and tragedy, it demands viewers think about trauma and repression as something in which they’re implicated—not something that happens just to one person, but as a collective break which is ongoing.
Maya (Margaret Qualley) is an emergency nurse with few family ties and little interest in romance. Until she meets adorable, charming math nerd Charlie (Gabriel Basso). The two meet over the sale of a desk, and soon they’re having romantic dinners, telling each other about their lives, meeting their loved ones, getting married and talking about kids—all the things you do when you’re young and have met the right person. It’s a sped-up romantic comedy. Right up until Covid.
The nightmare ER scenes, and the swiftness of Charlie’s decline, are brutal because they violate the happy romance film in progress and recreate a time of violent rupture and irrecoverable loss which we’ve largely ignored. And we’ve ignored it because we can’t face the presence of the future we should’ve had.
Maya can’t face it either. The second half of the film picks up a few years after Charlie’s death, as Maya wanders around Portugal and other European venues where she and Charlie planned to go but never did. She does telehealth sessions by day for income, drinks in the evening, and at night sleeps with a series of guys who don’t care if she overshares about her ex-husband or vomits on their shoes. When anyone tries to get close to her—whether her old friend Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger) or a new maybe love Felix (Aaron Pierre)—she panics. She’s afraid of getting hurt again, but she’s also mired in guilt because Charlie caught Covid from her. Either way, she runs.
Qualley delivers a masterful performance, sympathetic and yearning one moment, gracefully charming Felix’s daughter the next—and then abruptly turning into a vicious, emotionless robot, all clipped diction, uncompromising refusal, and frightened eyes. The person she is with Charlie in the first half of the movie hovers around her in the second like a ghost; mannerisms and habits echo but don’t fully inhabit her. She says that she feels like a fantasy of a person. She can’t figure out how to make her life hers any more.
Covid serves as a terrifying metaphor for disconnection from oneself and from others. Charlie’s death alone in the hospital, while Maya desperately urges him to fight over the phone from the parking lot, foreshadows and embodies her removal from her own emotional life and support structure. So does the scene in which she lies unspeaking in her empty apartment, while her mother-in-law screams at her helplessly from outside. The horror of Covid wasn’t just death, but the fact that we poisoned our own loved ones, and then couldn’t comfort them when they most needed us. It was, and is, an illness that’s expressly designed to maximize grief and guilt.
The movie doesn’t delve deeply into Covid politics. There are no anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists; Trump isn’t mentioned. Maya does give a lecture about Covid, nursing, burnout and self-care, but that’s as close as the movie comes to suggesting ongoing social effects and fault-lines.
But just acknowledging that Covid happened (and is still happening), that people died (and are still dying), and that people are still grieving, is such a novelty that it makes the vast majority of Hollywood films, and public discourse, look like a wasteland of open wounds and lies. Maya says that running away from your own life turns you into a monster, and that feels like it applies not just to her, and not just to individual grief, but our whole society, which experienced a massive trauma and then forgot about it so thoroughly that it turned around and handed public health to the same guy who’d presided over a million dead.
The phrase “the love of your life” refers to Charlie. It also refers to Maya’s lack of love of her own story, which she’s betrayed by refusing to live with it. The phrase is also how we’ve tried to forget part of our own collective life, and so have denied who we were, who we are, and who we can be. If art has a spiritual task, it’s to show us ourselves. Hollywood has refused to do that when it comes to Covid. In that context, The Love of Your Life is more than an excellent movie; it’s a necessary one.