109 min | PG-13 | September 11, 2020 | TriStar Pictures
Lucy keeps everything from her exes. A ticket stub, a tie, a tooth. When her latest breakup leaves her sleeping in a stranger’s car, she turns her hoarding into a gallery where other people dump their heartbreak too.
Lucy Gulliver is a sentimental hoarder. She keeps a relic from every relationship and labels it like a museum piece. After a public breakup costs her a job and her dignity, she climbs into the wrong car and meets Nick, a man renovating a failing boutique hotel. The film turns her compulsion into a project. She opens a gallery where strangers leave the objects their exes left behind. The Broken Hearts Gallery is a romantic comedy that runs on a clean conceit. It is about the lie that holding on to the past protects you from the future.
Geraldine Viswanathan plays Lucy as a motormouth who weaponizes charm to avoid feeling anything. She delivers the rapid patter without letting it harden into shtick, and she finds the panic under the chatter. Dacre Montgomery plays Nick as the restrained foil, dry where Lucy is frantic, and the contrast gives the banter friction. Molly Gordon and Phillipa Soo play Lucy’s roommates Amanda and Nadine with enough specificity to register as people rather than sounding boards. Utkarsh Ambudkar gets one good scene as Max, the ex who detonates the opening act. The supporting cast services the lead, and the lead earns it.
Natalie Krinsky writes and directs her first feature with a firm grip on rhythm and a weak grip on surprise. She stages the gallery itself as the film’s best idea. The donated objects appear with handwritten captions that function as miniature breakup stories, and these inserts do more emotional work than several of the scripted scenes. New York glows in the standard rom-com palette of warm boutiques and golden magic hour. Krinsky hits every beat the genre demands and skips none of them, which makes the destination visible from the first reel. The craft is assured and the structure is a template.
The film knows exactly what it is and executes it without apology. The plot mechanics are predictable down to the timing of the third-act misunderstanding. What carries it is the central performance and the conceit that the objects we refuse to throw away are confessions we cannot say out loud. Krinsky trusts Viswanathan to fill the gaps between the formula, and Viswanathan does. This is a competent crowd-pleaser elevated by a star who deserves better material than the one she is given.