Director Joey Power's SXSW romantic comedy lands on VOD and in select US theatres from October 23, with Anthony Ramos and Manny Jacinto rounding out the mess.
Vertical has put out the first trailer for Love Language, and the pitch is simple enough until it isn't. Chloë Grace Moretz plays Louisa "Lou" Klaussner, an aspiring author who, after a failed engagement, starts writing wedding vows for other people as a side hustle. Nice quiet premise. Doesn't stay quiet for long.
Enter Dash, played by Anthony Ramos, a charming serial dater who starts showing genuine interest in Lou. Right around the same time, Lou reconnects with Warren (Manny Jacinto), her college best friend and the crush she never quite got over. The twist, and it's a sharp one: Warren turns out to be engaged to Olivia (Isabel May), who happens to be one of Lou's wedding-vow clients.
So Lou ends up writing the vows for the wedding of the man she's still into, while a new guy is falling for her on the side. SXSW's own programme notes call this a "love-rectangle" rather than the standard triangle, four people, one mess, nobody clean.
The cast list has some real texture to it. Alongside Moretz, Ramos, Jacinto and May, the film features Lukas Gage, Billie Lourd and Chloe Fineman. It's the kind of ensemble that can carry a mid-budget rom-com on charisma alone if the writing holds up its end.
Joey Power writes and directs, his second feature after After Everything, having also made a handful of shorts before this. The producing credits are a bit of a grab bag too: Bert Hamelinck, Allison Hironaka, Ari Lubet, Jeff Grosvenor, and, interestingly, Colin Jost.
Love Language had its premiere earlier this year at SXSW, where festival programming first used that "love-rectangle" line to describe it. Vertical is now taking it wide, relatively speaking, releasing the film in select US theatres and on VOD starting October 23.
For a genre that's been running on studio autopilot for a while now, a rom-com willing to admit it's got four people in the frame instead of the usual three at least sounds like it's trying something. Whether the tangle resolves into something that actually lands, or just spins its wheels for ninety minutes, is the thing the trailer can't tell you.
That answer arrives October 23, when American audiences get to decide for themselves whether Lou's vow-writing side hustle was ever going to end well for anyone involved.
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