104 min | PG-13 | May 5, 2023 | Screen Gems
Mira Ray loses her fiancé and keeps texting his old number to feel close to him. The number now belongs to a stranger who reads every message and decides she is the love of his life. Céline Dion shows up to bless the whole arrangement, because nothing says romance like a man falling for your grief behind your back.
Mira Ray is a children’s book illustrator in New York grieving the death of her fiancé. To manage the loss she keeps texting his old phone number. That number now belongs to Rob Burns, a music journalist assigned to profile Céline Dion. Rob reads the messages, decides the woman writing them is the one for him, and engineers a way to meet her without admitting he has been reading her grief. The film presents this as a fairy tale. It is really a story about a man who falls for a stranger’s private mourning and hides how he found her.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas plays Mira with a warmth the script never earns. She commits to the grief in the early scenes and then has to pivot to romance on command. Sam Heughan plays Rob as an affable cipher. He smiles and listens and never registers the weight of what he is concealing, which drains the central romance of any tension. Céline Dion plays herself as a wise oracle of heartbreak, dispensing relationship advice to a journalist she barely knows. Russell Tovey turns up as Billy Brooks and does what he can with a role the script treats as filler.
James C. Strouse directs from his own screenplay, adapted from Sofie Cramer’s novel. Strouse built his name on small character studies, and the move to a glossy studio romance flattens his instincts. The film functions as a delivery system for Céline Dion’s catalog. Her songs swell on the soundtrack at every emotional beat, and the camera lingers on a Dion concert as if the music alone can supply the feeling the scenes lack. The New York settings stay bright and weightless, lit like a greeting card. Nothing in the production design suggests a city where anyone actually grieves.
The film mistakes a stalker’s setup for a meet-cute. Rob never faces a reckoning for reading a stranger’s most private messages, and the script rewards the deception with a happy ending. A sharper movie would sit with the violation and ask what it means to fall for someone’s mourning. This one wants only the swell of a Céline Dion chorus over a kiss. It sands the discomfort off its own idea until nothing remains but gloss. The result is a romance with no pulse.