A STAR, FULLY FORMED

In Next Life, Emilia Clarke carries Drake Doremus's most affecting film in years and proves she belongs among the great romantic leads.

By MIGUEL MATEO | JUNE 8, 2026

Next Life is the best thing Drake Doremus has made since Like Crazy, and it works for many of the same reasons. Doremus has always trusted silence more than most directors working in this register, and here he lets the film breathe. We get to sit with the characters and their emotional states, to hear the pauses in their conversations, to catch the subtle looks and lingering stares that say more than dialogue would. It's a welcome corrective to so much of what romance on screen has become, a parade of quickly paced films that rarely slow down long enough for us to understand who anyone actually is. By easing off the gas, Doremus gives us a real sense of these people.

If the film stumbles anywhere, it's in how it imagines the two lives its central character might have lived. The premise invites a starker contrast between those paths, and I kept wishing the differences had been drawn more boldly. Instead, both lives arrive at a similar place, each ending in its own kind of unhappiness. Maybe that is the point. Maybe the film wants the bittersweetness to land precisely because neither outcome is clean, and the takeaway is that we would learn from our experiences either way. It still satisfies, even if a sharper divergence between the two futures would have given the idea more force.

The performances are strong across the board, and the two leads have an easy, lived-in chemistry. But this is Emilia Clarke's film, and she carries it. I remain genuinely puzzled that she hasn't become the U.K.'s answer to Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock, because everything that should make her one is right here on screen. The charisma, the impassioned eyes, the comic timing, and the dramatic depth to anchor the heavier scenes. That same combination is what made everyone notice Rachel McAdams early on, though McAdams seems to have resisted any romcom-queen coronation, choosing to dabble across genres instead. What Clarke conjures takes me back to the glory days of the 90s, the effervescence and magic that Roberts and Bullock had in abundance, along with the rarer gift of making an audience empathize with them no matter how flawed or compromised their characters might be.

That is pure movie star magic, and I hope Hollywood is paying closer attention than it has been. We are well past the post-Julia, post-Sandra, post-Meg Ryan years, when stars like Kate Hudson and Katherine Heigl tried to take what worked for Roberts and Bullock (and what Jennifer Aniston had on Friends) and crank it up a notch, only to come up empty. Nobody has quite filled that space since. Clarke has the gifts to, and Next Life is the clearest sign yet that she should be the one to do it.

Rating: ★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Currently playing at Tribeca Film Festival