‘Next Life’ review: Emilia Clarke leads Drake Doremus’ ill-considered romantic thought exercise

Ivy Bettencourt (Emilia Clarke), the heroine of writer-director Drake Doremus’s latest romantic thriller, is a bit of a mess.

We know this because the first time we see her, she’s been sleeping off her alarm so much that she can barely catch her train — at which point she promptly spills coffee on a handsome stranger, Diego, played by Edgar Ramírez. We also know this because one of the next times we see her, she’s in shock at her daughter’s baptism, having just reconnected with Noah (Jack Farthing), the ex-boyfriend and ex-boss who recently broke her heart.

This is a woman who doesn’t quite know what she wants, what she’s missing, or how to find it. Premiere in Tribeca, Next life He tries to embrace her in all this uncertainty, giving her two full truths to try things or make mistakes and try again. But this Sliding doorsThe style of the thought experiment is too structured to arouse much emotion, making universal concepts like “destiny,” “purpose,” and “love” abstract rather than the substance of life.

Ivy’s parallel realities branch off as she enters the train, a few seconds apart in one timeline from the other. In the first story, a coffee spill sparks an instant flirtation with Diego, a jazz musician whose most powerful principle is a hatred of selling out absolutely everything. As it turns out, Ivy was once a singer herself, though she quit to pursue a more practical career in an unspecified field that involved making phone calls and looking at spreadsheets.

In this timeline, Ivy seems to get everything she wants. She and Diego fall hard and fast for each other. I got pregnant and decided to keep him. She moves into his place, a giant exposed brick studio overflowing with plants, art, and cozy blankets but with no doors or walls at all, not even a bathroom. (Okay, maybe you don’t understand Everything She wants to.) With his encouragement, she looks forward to resuming her music career.

In the other timeline, Ivy didn’t meet Diego on that train. Instead, she brought Noah back after his grand (and frankly obnoxious) gesture of interrupting the Bible reading during the baptism to beg her for another chance. Ivy also gets everything she wants, but they are different things. She rejoins Noah’s company, and crushes it at her strangely inexplicable job when they’re not connected to the supply closet. You move into his space, which is a sleek glass-and-steel affair with bathroom walls and everything. They got engaged, began artificial insemination, and rediscovered their mutual passion for jazz recordings.

In both timelines, Doremus uses a handheld camera to capture long close-ups, which, combined with Dan Romer’s dripping music, suggest that we’re meant to find all of this terribly moving and incredibly intimate. But his visions of love seem too rigidly orchestrated, oscillating between attractive scenes of hugging and dancing in the streets and very sad scenes of fighting (seemingly out of nowhere) or crying over bad news. You miss the mundane moments, special details, and slow changes that actually make up a long-term relationship. Without them, Next life It often plays like a dead wife montage, or perhaps a reel for your attention.

On this front: as a showcase for the pioneering trio, Next life It is flattering if not exactly a revelation. Ramirez highlights his powerful sex appeal and beautiful singing voice as the witty Diego, while Farthing brings a welcome touch of sweetness to the stuffy-suited Noah. And Clarke plays Ivy with enough laid-back charm (“I’m unemployed as well as single. It’s a catch!” she quips while jokingly flipping her hair) that it’s easy to see why either would fall head over heels for her.

The problem is that upon closer inspection, none of them feel quite human. Take in the contrast between their places (courtesy of production designer Elizabeth Marie Moore). Noah’s apartment is so impersonal, vacant of even one lot, that it feels less like a home than a company apartment for visiting executives. It just tells us what He writes For a man he is (i.e., rich and kind of boring), not who he is as an individual. Diego’s restaurant is more eclectic on the surface, a riot of colors and textures cramming every square inch of floor space. But none of it seems unique to him either. It may also be a composite of Pinterest boards tagged “bohemian studio apartment”.

In neither place is there any evidence at all of Ivy’s presence—no changes to the decor or layout once she moved in, no shelves removed to make room for her memorabilia or tools, not even any thoughtless clutter left in the kitchen. It is as if she were a paper doll, being dropped first into one general background and then into another without leaving any trace in either.

Next life Ruminating on artistic passion is a little more interesting than romantic love. As Diego sees it, real artists create because they have to — “because it’s inevitable” — and they don’t let anything, not even personal insecurity or financial instability, stop them. Like Noah, creation is an admirable endeavor if it makes one happy, but it is not an absolute necessity for a fulfilling existence. The Ivies are in the middle, trying to figure out where their devotion to music fits in with their desires for children, marriage, or stability.

But as with Ivy’s relationships, the film is too unspecific to push the question anywhere interesting, let alone meaningful. Ivy cares about music because the screenplay decides she does, and not for any reason that we feel it in our bones—just as it does with her goals of becoming a mother, or advancing at her unspecified office job, or whatever else. Doremus’s reflections on what makes a life well lived should seem universal and profound, and relevant to absolutely every human being. However, perhaps they would have been more harmed, if life here felt truly lived at all.