Dave Malloy’s Three Houses and Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn remain my favorite show and movie about COVID. 

(Not coincidentally, I rank both artists among the pinnacles of their respective mediums).

Before continuing further with today’s topic, an important distinction must be drawn: the lede refers to movies about COVID, and not movies with production conditions that seem dictated by the practical strictures of shooting “safely” in its aftermath (think: small casts, one isolated location, etc.).

A type of movie that faded away as protocols eased. 

As did movies about COVID. We got a handful of immediate reactions produced near the height, a rash of documentaries, a peppering of allegories (now in theaters: A Prayer for the Dying), and then a trickle of more patient diagnoses in the following years. 

Love of Your Life breaks a release drought, and adds some novel wrinkles for the subgenre. The vast majority are primarily about the experience of living through the pandemic, yet this new movie is more about how COVID impacts the protagonist well after 2020, a perspective that requires accumulated temporal distance. Its tone strikes a rather unfamiliar register, too: a Margaret Qualley prestige drama…

…combined with a Hallmark streamer?!

And COVID is the soap opera-esque, mid-narrative twist?!