No one spirals into a profound crisis without some kind of summons, even if it arrives disguised as intimate tragedy or an illness with a definitive name. Behind every rupture in the emotional stability of youth lies a spark of reinvention, asserting itself as the only viable way forward. Rather than telling a story about the fear of death, what unfolds here is a vital restlessness — a refusal to accept the comfortable linearity of things. The script explores this inner dissonance with disarming tenderness, never denying the weight of loss, but also never allowing it to outweigh the impulse to keep going. The narrative may appear light, but it demands the viewer’s willingness to read between the lines — to uncover a kind of pain that only finds relief when turned into action.
It’s a subtle kind of provocation: what if a mother’s greatest act of love was to force her daughter to do everything she herself never had the courage to attempt? Elizabeth’s cancer recurrence isn’t a final punctuation mark — it’s a trigger. By leaving her daughter a string of near-absurd tasks in recorded videos, she unsettles not just Alex’s routine, but the very foundations of her self-concept. The will, reimagined as a moral challenge, reshapes grief and shifts the dramatic axis toward forced reconstruction. This isn’t a typical journey of overcoming — it’s an essay on the discomfort of being forced to reinvent oneself before even knowing who one truly is.
With each item on the list, Alex doesn’t merely resist her mother’s orders; she confronts her own inertia. The abandoned career, the neglected piano, love as an improbable hypothesis — everything seems chosen not to inspire, but to destabilize. And therein lies the script’s most brilliant move: channeling rebellion as the fuel for transformation. What might have been a melodramatic plot shifts into a space of delicate tension, supported by performances that strike a balance between the artificial and the sincere. Sofia Carson avoids playing the victim and instead crafts a protagonist who doesn’t seek admiration, only to be understood in her hesitation.
The arrival of attorney Bradley, tasked with overseeing Alex’s commitment to the will, shifts the story from grief into romantic territory — but not in predictable fashion. Rather than easing the tension, his presence intensifies it, exposing the emotional immaturity still governing Alex’s relationships. Their dynamic refuses idealization: she falters, he hesitates, and love is never portrayed as a solution, but rather as another test. The film deftly moves between drama and romantic comedy, all while sidestepping the genre’s more tired conventions.
With the support of Lori Nelson Spielman’s original material, Brooks weaves in a layer of ambiguity that defies any simplistic interpretation. Elizabeth is neither martyr nor heroine — she’s a woman who, even in death, tries to steer her daughter’s life with a mix of guilt and care. The list is less a legacy than a reckoning. And if there’s a twist at the end, it doesn’t rewrite her motivations — it reinforces just how entangled human affection always is with contradiction. There is no altruism without control, no love without its share of imposition.
What makes the film striking is its rejection of narrative comfort. It wears the shape of a comedy but confronts far weightier questions than it lets on. Quietly, it meditates on what it means to live up to the expectations of someone who’s gone — someone who, paradoxically, continues to direct things from afar. In this context, the list becomes more than a dramatic device: it’s an ethical test. How far should one go to earn something they might not even want?
In the end, it’s not romance that redeems Alex, nor the completion of tasks imposed. What drives her is the unease stirred by an absence heavier than any presence. There’s irony in realizing that only after losing the right to be a daughter does she find the possibility of being fully herself. The film offers not an answer, but a kind of vertigo — the realization that maybe our greatest transformations don’t come from within, but from external demands that force us to confront what we’ve long avoided.
Film: The Life List
Director: Adam Brooks
Year: 2025
Genres: Comedy/Drama/Romance
Rating: 8/10