106 min | PG-13 | February 14, 2020 | Universal Pictures
A guarded museum curator inherits her dead mother’s secrets and a journalist who wants to dig them up. They fall for each other slow and low-key while the past explains the present. Sometimes the quietest romance is the one that trusts you to lean in.
Mae Eames works at a museum in New York. Her mother Christina was a famous photographer who left her cold and distant before she died. When a journalist named Michael Block arrives to research Christina’s early work, he and Mae fall into each other. Stella Meghie builds two love stories across two timelines and lets them rhyme. The film is about inheritance. Mae fears she will repeat her mother’s mistake of choosing work over love, and the past keeps explaining the present.
Issa Rae plays Mae as guarded and self-aware. She holds people at a distance and knows she does it. Rae lets the wariness crack slowly instead of all at once. LaKeith Stanfield plays Michael with an easy, unhurried warmth that makes the courtship feel adult. The two of them generate heat by underplaying. Chanté Adams plays the young Christina with ambition that reads as both gift and wound, and she makes the abandoned mother of the present timeline make sense.
Meghie writes and directs, and she shoots the romance in soft, saturated interiors that treat skin and lamplight as the main event. The camera lingers on faces in dim apartments and lets conversations run without cutting away for coverage. The dual timeline moves on visual rhymes rather than dialogue, and a single photograph becomes the hinge between the two eras. Robert Glasper’s jazz score keeps the tempo low and patient. The film trusts mood over plot mechanics, and the restraint is a choice rather than a limitation.
This is a romance that prioritizes texture and feeling over conflict. Meghie refuses melodrama and keeps the stakes intimate and internal. The cost of that choice is dramatic urgency, and the second timeline stays thinner than the first. What the film does well it does with confidence. It makes the case that two careful people deciding to risk each other is enough of a story.