Sometimes you need a movie to wrap you up like a warm blanket and make you feel gooey – and a good rom-com can very much do that. Still, if you throw in a bit more than just the emotions of new love, you can really make something memorable, as the success of the fourth Bridget Jones movie is demonstrating right now.
It's got more grief involved than people were expecting, and that combination of bittersweet sadness with the excitement of new connections looks like it'll power a new Netflix movie, too. The Life List seems like a lovely idea, centring around a young woman's loss of her mother.
Sofia Carson stars as Alex, who is bereft when her mother dies, but surprised to learn that she's been left a particularly interesting bequest. Her mother happened to find a handwritten list of ambitions and dreams from Alex's childhood, and is leaving it to her again – with the explicit demand that Alex should try to tick off each item on the list.
It includes crazy ideas like playing 1v1 basketball against a New York Knicks player, but also more normal stuff like getting a tattoo, and trying stand-up comedy at least once. Each time she completes a task, she'll be given a DVD with more messages from her mum, which is quite the incentive.
Still, all of that is about the grief and processing side of things – where does love come into it? Well, firstly, in the course of her tasks she'll clearly meet at least one interesting male party who'd like to get to know her better. More importantly, though, it just so happens that the lawyer handling all of this "last will and testament" action is a bit of a smouldering love interest of his own (played by Kyle Allen).
I'm not a betting man, but I think I could win some pretty safe money taking a gamble on who Alex will end up with, given the genre and the way that trailer is edited. You'll be able to find out for yourself in around a month, though – The Life List will hit Netflix on 28 March, and should be a perfect movie to snuggle up with.
