A Boston nurse buys a small desk from a stranger, and the drawer sticks. That is how Love of Your Life, Rachel Morrison’s romantic drama for Amazon MGM Studios, sets its story in motion, and the stranger, Charlie, becomes the first of two men who shape the next several years of Maya’s life. Margaret Qualley plays Maya, Gabriel Basso plays Charlie, and Aaron Pierre plays Felix, the Londoner she meets after the future she planned with Charlie has fallen apart. After a festival premiere and a short run in American cinemas, the film is now streaming on Prime Video worldwide.

It is a romantic drama told in chapters, written by Julia Cox, the screenwriter of Nyad, and produced by Ryan Gosling and Jessie Henderson for Open Invite Entertainment. The official synopsis keeps the central turn vague: a chance encounter, a romance, a future that abruptly falls apart, and a new life that forces Maya to work out who she is, what she wants and how to love again. The reviews from its festival screenings are less discreet, so anyone who wants to go in blind should stop at the trailer.

The story begins in 2020. Maya is 26 when she meets Charlie, an extroverted nerd in the A.V. Club’s description, and the romance moves fast. Then the pandemic arrives. In TheWrap’s account, their first night together is interrupted when Charlie runs for his asthma inhaler. The Toronto festival’s programme note says the marriage ends with the pandemic, and the film, divided into chapters marked by Maya’s age, finds her at 31 as a widow living in Lisbon. She works as a digital nomad in Portugal, meets Felix, and later moves to England.

Around the two men, the cast is deeper than a streaming romance usually gets. Patrick Schwarzenegger plays Jason, a former college flame whose closeness to Maya does not make Charlie jealous, according to the A.V. Club; Catherine Keener plays Charlie’s mother; Tamara Lawrance and Corey Johnson complete the principal cast. The same review describes the second half moving through Portugal, London, Tokyo and New Orleans. The production record matches that spread: the shoot was planned across Europe, with Lisbon among the locations, and also filmed in the UK, in New Orleans and in Boston, where Morrison shot in the fall.

The Boston half is where the director’s own life enters the film. Morrison told The Boston Globe that she asked Cox to replace an early Swan Boats scene, which she found “a little postcard-y”, with something that felt like Cambridge and Boston “but maybe not the expected version”. The replacement was Washington Tower at Mount Auburn Cemetery, which the characters climb, and where both of Morrison’s parents are buried. She called that ironic. “We were shooting five minutes from my parents’ gravestones,” she told the paper.

Morrison came to directing from the camera: her work on Mudbound made her the first woman nominated for the Academy Award for cinematography, and she shot Black Panther. Her directing debut was The Fire Inside, the drama about the boxer Claressa Shields. On Love of Your Life she handed the camera to Todd Banhazl as director of photography, with Jennifer Vecchiarello editing and Dustin O’Halloran writing the score. What she says she wanted from the images is “a cinematic realism that I’m always chasing”, and in the Globe interview she put it more plainly: “I find so much beauty in realism.”

Critics have not agreed on whether the film holds its two halves together. Steve Pond, reviewing the Toronto premiere for TheWrap, wrote that “It’s not a rom-com; it’s a tragedy”, and found it “schizophrenic at times, enamored of joyous moments but undercutting the pleasure with pain.” Caroline Siede at the A.V. Club gave it a B-, calling it “anchored by Qualley’s luminously watchable screen presence” and describing “a path that’s predictable in its big beats but surprising in its small ones.” At the time of writing it holds 76% on Rotten Tomatoes from 21 reviews and a score of 61 on Metacritic.

Qualley arrives here from a run of very different work, including The Substance, Poor Things, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Honey Don’t. The structure the reviews describe asks Basso to carry the first movement and Pierre the second, with Qualley as the only constant between them, which makes the casting of the two men as central to the pitch as hers.

For Amazon MGM Studios, the route is a familiar one for adult drama. The studio bought Cox’s script with Gosling attached to produce, placed the finished film in the Special Presentations section in Toronto, and gave it about a week in select US cinemas before the streaming release. Mid-budget romances aimed at grown-ups seldom get wide theatrical releases now, and Prime Video is where most of this film’s audience will meet it, in the US and in every other market at the same moment.

The question the film sets up, and that its synopsis and trailer leave open, is whether Felix can be a love of Maya’s life without being measured against Charlie, by her or by the people watching. Morrison’s own answer, given to the Globe, is about attention rather than comparison: “you have to be open to the beauty in order to see it or be ready for it.” The title is singular. The film has two men in it.

Love of Your Life runs 106 minutes. It had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2026, opened in select US theaters on October 7 and streams on Prime Video worldwide from October 14. It is directed by Rachel Morrison from a screenplay by Julia Cox, and stars Margaret Qualley, Gabriel Basso, Aaron Pierre, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Catherine Keener, Tamara Lawrance and Corey Johnson.