Love Language lets Moretz write other people's vows, and critics say the words outrun the feeling

Chloë Grace Moretz plays a Chicago writer who earns money ghostwriting other people's wedding vows in Love Language, a romantic comedy that distributor Vertical released in select US theaters and on digital video on demand on October 23, 2026. Within a day, Variety called it a "pleasant, undemanding watch", while the Hollywood Reporter, reviewing it from the SXSW festival in March, had found it "better at telling than showing".

A ghostwriter who cannot write her own

Louisa "Lou" Klaussner, the character Moretz plays, turns a broken engagement into a side business. According to Variety, she reuses the vows she had written for her own cancelled wedding when her best friend Tilda (Billie Lourd) asks for help. Guests at the ceremony learn who wrote them, and strangers start to ask for their own.

The trouble starts with a client. Olivia (Isabel May), a wealthy importer, hires Lou to write her vows for a wedding to Warren (Manny Jacinto), a public defender who turns out to be Lou's old college crush. Lou takes the job and keeps that fact from Olivia. As the wedding approaches, Variety writes, she finds herself "unable to write a word".

A third man, Dash (Anthony Ramos), meets Lou at Tilda's wedding and courts her while she insists on keeping things casual. Joey Power wrote and directed the film, which runs 104 minutes. Deadline noted that Vertical's first trailer followed the SXSW world premiere in March, and lists Colin Jost among the producers.

Critics agree on the setup and split on the heart

Guy Lodge's Variety review, published October 24, 2026, places the film among romantic comedies "in nostalgic thrall" to 1990s tropes, with the meet-cute, the best friend and the airport dash all present. He is fond of the premise and less so of the jokes. The film, he writes, is "cozily, even sentimentally romantic" while "neglecting the comic half of the equation". The vows themselves, in his ear, sound a bit "Hallmark × Rupi Kaur", and they still go down a treat at the wedding.

Angie Han's Hollywood Reporter review, dated March 16, 2026, gives the problem a sharper edge. Her bottom line is "Words fall short." The film, she says, does a decent job of explaining emotions and has a harder time projecting them, so that even the grand third-act gesture feels like "a concession to a tried-and-true narrative formula". She finds a few sparks between Moretz and Jacinto and very few between Moretz and Ramos.

She also quotes the nickname that gives the film its pitch: Lou's friend Gus (Lukas Gage) calls her "the Cyrano of Chicago". Han adds that finding the right words is neither Lou's problem nor the film's. What both lack, in her reading, is the ability to lose themselves in the feelings underneath.

Lodge also measures the film against a Chicago classic. The premise, he writes, is plainly a nod to "My Best Friend’s Wedding", though the beauty of that film is that it gave its heroine altogether less enviable options. Here, he argues, the romantic dilemma feels overly protracted and low-stakes, because Warren is not half as charismatic as Dash.

Han is kinder to the setting. The cinematographer Andrew Wehde, she writes, captures Chicago with an almost dreamy eye, and from a distance Lou and Warren look right together wandering the city at twilight. Up close, she says, the sparks thin out. She is fond of one detail in particular: Lou's day job writing slogans for a potato chip company, and the ways she avoids deadlines, which include cleaning her whole house and learning to make tortillas from scratch.

On the other side, Charles Hartford of But Why Tho, in a review published October 20, 2026, headlines his verdict "Feels Authentic And Human". He praises a "nuanced core story" in which Lou is flawed but never unforgivably so, and in which she owns up to what she has done.

The critics even disagree about the same character. Hartford finds Dash too good to be believable, a man who seems to exist only to make Lou look ridiculous for hesitating. Lodge calls Ramos's Dash the character who feels most "embedded in the real world", and finds Warren far less charismatic.

Two critics, one man, opposite verdicts.

The research behind the vocabulary

Variety's headline says Moretz "Sells Words of Affirmation". The phrase belongs to a framework most readers will recognise. Gary Chapman, a Baptist pastor, proposed in his book The Five Love Languages that people give and receive love in five ways: physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time and gifts. He held that couples are happier when each partner speaks the other's primary language.

The idea has an enormous audience. The University of Toronto Mississauga reported on December 20, 2023 that Chapman's book has sold over 20 million copies and that more than 30 million people have taken the online quiz.

That same report described a review by psychologist Emily Impett, graduate student Gideon Park and Amy Muise of York University, published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Impett said they were skeptical, so they reviewed the existing studies. By her account, none of the 10 studies backed Chapman's claims.

Three findings stood out. People report that all five kinds of expression matter to them. The five categories overlap more than the theory suggests. And there was no sign that partners who match on a primary language are happier: "People are basically happier in relationships when they receive any of these expressions of love", Impett said.

She also pointed to the origin of the model. Chapman built it, she said, on a sample of white, religious, mixed-gender, traditional couples, which leaves out things such as affirming a partner's personal goals outside the relationship. The team offered a different image, a balanced diet of relational nutrients that, in Impett's words, "keeps all expressions of love on the menu". The Association for Psychological Science, summarising the paper for teachers, describes the same metaphor and says relationships may survive on verbal affirmation alone but do best with a balance over time.

A study that found a match, and one that did not

The literature is not unanimous. In a 2022 paper in PLOS ONE, published on June 22, psychologists Olha Mostova and Maciej Stolarski of the University of Warsaw, with Gerald Matthews of George Mason University, studied 100 heterosexual couples whose relationships had lasted between six months and 24 years. They measured how far each person's preferred ways of receiving affection differed from the ways their partner expressed it.

Greater mismatch went with lower relationship satisfaction, in both men and women. The gaps in touch, words of affirmation and quality time each showed a link on their own. The authors reported no competing interests.

The design limits what that means. Participants were volunteers recruited through social media and personal contacts, from 31 nationalities, and they answered an online questionnaire between October 2018 and March 2019. The authors themselves note the risks of self-report and say the direction of causality is unknown: more satisfied partners may simply give and notice more of these gestures.

The paper also describes earlier tests. One study of 84 university student couples found no significant effect of matching on relationship quality, and another that tried to teach couples each other's profile found no change in behaviour.

What a commissioned sentence can and cannot carry

Variety singles out Olivia, played by May as "both a princess and an underestimated observer", as the character the audience most wants to know better, and she is also the one who pays for words. In the film's logic a client hands a stranger a few memories and receives a draft she can read aloud to the man she is about to marry, while the writer sits two seats away with her own history in the room. The comedy, such as it is, lives in that arrangement. The studies above say something gentler about it: affection that arrives in any form tends to be welcome, and a spoken promise is one nutrient among several, to be followed by many ordinary acts across the years.

None of this research tested bought vows, and no source here claims that a ghostwritten promise is worth less than a home-made one. What the two bodies of work share is a modest finding: words matter, but they travel alongside everything else partners do.

That is close to the film's own difficulty as Han describes it. It is a small thing, and it is the whole plot. Lou's craft is the sentence, and she can place one in a stranger's mouth that makes a groom cry. The one she cannot write is the one for the person she has history with.

Matching tools tend to disappoint in the same way. A recent Reflets brief on a Netflix series about a compatibility app noted that psychologists who tried to predict attraction with algorithms found they could not.

Impett's last observation concerns the quiz itself. It forces people to pick between, say, receiving gifts and holding hands, and in real life nobody has to make that trade.

Sources

• University of Toronto Mississauga, Changing the conversation around love languages, Megan Easton, December 20, 2023
• PLOS ONE, Mostova, Stolarski and Matthews, June 22, 2022