Movie review: The Last Letter from your Lover

Movies are a good escape from our tedious and boring routines. Similarly, I stumbled upon a romantic movie starring Shailene Woodley and Felicity Jones on Netflix. The movie titled “The Last Letter from your Lover” follows the journey of two couples during the 1960s and the present time respectively. It is based on a novel of the same name written by Jojo Moyes.

The movie begins with Jennifer Sterling (Shailene Woodley) sitting in a car with her husband Laurence (Joe Alwyn) going to her house, supposedly after being discharged from the hospital. It is then established that Jennifer has amnesia and has no memory of her accident which left her with a scar on her face. We see Laurence as a generous but emotionally distant husband which sets the tone of their marriage for the audience.

Flash forward in the present, we see Ellie Haworth (Felicity Jones), a journalist who is a prosaic person, is asked to write an article about the recently deceased editor of the paper she is working for. This introduces us to a potential love interest for Ellie, the archivist Rory (Nabhaan Rizwan) helps her go through the editor’s archive. Going through the papers Ellie finds old love letters from someone named “Boot” addressed to his lover “J”. Reading through the letters, she becomes emotionally invested in the lives of the mysterious couple and decides to find them and learn how the story ended for them.

Later in the movie, we learned about “J” and “Boot” who is none other than Jennifer Sterling and Anthony O’Hare (Callum Turner), a handsome foreign correspondent who arrives in French Riviera with a purpose to interview Laurence. The sparks flew between Jennifer and Anthony and the rest was history.

The plot was redundant as it had some similarities with the movie Letters to Juliet. The protagonist finds an old letter of a mysterious love affair, finds the couple behind it and helps them meet their happy ending. Unlike this, The Last Letter From Your Lover has little to no chemistry between the couples. Both Felicity and Shailene carried the movie on their shoulders and gave good performances but even their charisma was not enough to save the weak plot and expressions. Bland dialogues and lack of expressions brought the movie to a point where it almost lost its meaning and message. Another plotline that was bothersome was how much it had romanticized adultery. A love affair rising at the cost of ruining one’s marriage. It’s safe to say that the biggest mistake of this movie was its whitewashing of adultery with no context.

Despite having an attractive cast, the movie was underwhelming and felt flat with almost no chemistry among the couples to support the story. While watching the movie one would feel either the movie was miscast or the story itself is not well-constructed.

Needless to say, the movie delivers what it had promised in the trailer -a cliched-filled romance. It had its heart in the right place but there are definitely better romantic movies out there.