‘Next Life’ Review: Emilia Clarke Navigates Parallel Lives and Sliding Doors in Drake Doremus’s Wishy-Washy Romance [C+] Tribeca Festival

Drake Doremus broke through in 2011 with his fourth feature, Like Crazy, a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner that arrived at a moment when indie romance still felt capable of shaping the broader cultural conversation. In the 15 years since, he has directed another half-dozen features, though none has cast quite the same shadow.

His latest, Next Life, premiering in Tribeca Festival’s Spotlight Narrative section, finds him returning once more to matters of the heart. Pleasant and eminently watchable, it nevertheless carries the unmistakable scent of something secondhand. Anyone who survived the 1990s MiraBrit boom — when Harvey Weinstein stuffed American arthouses with a steady stream of mostly middling British imports — will recognize the DNA almost immediately.

The film opens with Emilia Clarke’s Ivy oversleeping and dropping the same expletive that Hugh Grant’s Charles famously uttered while scrambling before each ceremonial gauntlet in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The homage feels intentional, especially since that film’s screenwriter, Richard Curtis, pops up in a cameo. Rushing out the door with a coffee in hand, Ivy boards a train en route to a christening. There Doremus borrows the central conceit of one of the quintessential MiraBrits, the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors. Like Paltrow’s Helen, Ivy’s life fractures into parallel paths: one in which her journey proceeds as planned, another in which a chance encounter alters its course.

In the version Ivy has carefully mapped out — the pink timeline, distinguished by the outfit she selected for the christening — her cheating ex-boyfriend, Noah (Jack Farthing), offers a sufficiently heartfelt mea culpa and wins her back. She returns to work for him in a respectable if uninspiring corporate position and moves into his immaculate apartment, its opulence matched only by its sterility. The alternate timeline, coded blue, begins with a collision worthy of a romance novel. Ivy literally runs into a rugged yet seemingly sensitive stranger named Diego (Édgar Ramírez) aboard the train, spilling coffee over both of them. After retreating to the restroom to change into a denim ensemble from her travel bag, she emerges into an entirely different future. Noah is rejected, her long-dormant dream of becoming a jazz singer is revived, and Diego — conveniently enough, a professional musician with a working ensemble — becomes both lover and collaborator. Soon she takes up residence in Diego’s bohemian loft, a space so defiantly open-concept that even the bathroom lacks walls.

What makes the film feel especially nostalgic is not merely its narrative architecture but its faith in a distinctly late-20th-century romantic fantasy. Noah and Diego are less fully realized men than opposing lifestyle brands. One offers professional stability, bland luxury, and the kind of adulthood measured in square footage and tasteful furnishings; the other promises artistic fulfillment, spontaneity, and the seductive disorder of creative life. The contrast is so cleanly drawn that it occasionally resembles an interior-design mood board. One apartment gleams; the other breathes. One relationship is organized around predictability; the other around possibility.

The MiraBrits of the 1990s often trafficked in similarly frictionless visions of adulthood, where careers, housing, and financial security seemed to materialize offscreen, leaving the characters free to devote themselves to romantic dilemmas. Next Life inherits that tradition almost wholesale. The film treats artistic aspiration as an emotional question rather than a practical one, as though becoming a working musician were chiefly a matter of listening to one’s heart. That may be part of the fantasy, but it also limits the film’s ability to engage with the consequences of Ivy’s choices. The competing futures are presented as equally viable options, yet the material conditions that would sustain either life remain conspicuously absent.

By romance-novel standards, both futures qualify as wish fulfillment, though one is plainly coded as the safer, more conventional path. Yet even these carefully constructed fantasies prove unstable. As though the film fears Ivy might otherwise have too much, domestic complications arrive in both realities: infertility in one, an unplanned pregnancy in the other. Either way, she elects to toss the baby out with the bathwater, metaphorically speaking of course — there is no literal baby-tossing in the film. What is more striking is how little interest Next Life shows in the practical realities surrounding either scenario. Doremus has already introduced the question of artistic vocation, yet the economic dimensions of Ivy’s choices never receive meaningful consideration. The omission registers more as a missed opportunity than as any kind of considered restraint.

The film is on firmer footing musically. No fewer than 34 songs are credited by the time the end reel arrives, and Diego’s ensemble is genuinely persuasive, even when its bossa nova stylings drift toward easy-listening territory. Doremus has always been an instinctive curator of mood, and here music functions less as accompaniment than as atmosphere, supplying a warmth and emotional texture that the screenplay sometimes struggles to generate on its own. Ramírez performs “Yo pensé (Eu pensei)” and “Lluvia de pasión (Chuva de verão)” with considerable charm. If Diego existed outside the confines of the movie, he is exactly the sort of artist whose LP I would happily buy on vinyl.

Next Life is a competently assembled crowd-pleaser but it never becomes an especially illuminating one. For all its talk of alternate futures and roads not taken, the film advances the conversation about women’s romantic and professional possibilities by scarcely a millimeter. When Ivy, in both timelines, begins to wonder about the life she might have chosen instead, Doremus treats her uncertainty as a narrative device rather than a psychological reality. The result is a film fascinated by crossroads yet curiously unwilling to explore what it actually means to stand at one.

Grade: C+

This review is from the 2026 Tribeca Festival where Next Life had its world premiere.