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.

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. Cinematographer turned film-maker Rachel Morrison went from capturing the small (Fruitvale Station) to the epic (Black Panther) and she’s brought both to her work as director. I was disappointed her excellent boxing drama The Fire Inside didn’t reach a wider audience and while I understand the unwillingness to bet on a genre more commonly suited to streaming, it’s a shame Amazon isn’t giving this one a wider big-screen rollout especially given how lush so much of it looks (it’ll have a token week in cinemas before it’s next to your shampoo order).

There’s perhaps not quite as much depth or texture as one might hope, especially as a rambling third act scrambles for something close to profundity, and the finished product, together with its weirdly muted rollout, might not quite justify the intensity, or the high price, involved with the auction. But it is refreshing to see a battle over a grounded drama rather than heightened genre for once (I’m assuming the Covid angle is what launched it into the marketplace).

It also gives Qualley one of her most grounded roles too, a challenge for the actor to play a real, relatable person after mainly doing the opposite in films like The Substance, Poor Things, Honey, Don’t and Blue Moon. It’s an easy fit for her, more so than her last attempt, Maid, and we buy her grand gamut of grief (devastation, frustration, horniness) without the need for her to histrionically overplay the life-changing horror of it, also helped by Basso’s believably specific performance, someone who is admittedly hard to forget.

If Schwarzenegger feels entirely miscast as her bestie and their lived-in long-term dynamic hard to buy then a more neatly suited Pierre more than makes up for it. He’s another actor who has mostly been limited to something else – action, an American accent – but he’s an incredibly charismatic romantic lead here and it’s not hard to buy how he might find a way to break down the walls of Maya, that have been understandably built up so very high.

Their electric chemistry helps to power the film as it plods into a final third that feels considerably more aimless than it should. The journey we take with Maya has been in many ways such an epic one, in both literal and emotional scope, and it feels like after all of that, we should be taken somewhere more meaningful and left with insights more incisive than what we end up with. For a film so set on exploring the monumental sweep of both love and life, the end result soothes rather than soars.

• Love of Your Life is premiering at the Toronto film festival and will be on limited release in cinemas on 7 October and on Amazon Prime on 14 October