‘Miss You, Love You’ Review: A Slow-Burning Drama About Grief and Reconciliation

The weight of a complicated family history emerges slowly in Miss You, Love You, much as it does in many stage plays. The curious thing is that this isn’t a theatrical adaptation but an original screenplay that is nevertheless structured very much like one. Two actors, a house, and the preparations for a funeral form its backbone, gradually revealing the personal dramas of its two central characters.

Those characters are Diane (Allison Janney) and Jamie (Andrew Rannells). Diane lives alone in a spacious, luxurious house in New Mexico, and Jamie arrives to keep her company. He’s neither her husband, nor her son, nor a relative of any kind. In fact, they’ve never met. The film parcels out its information carefully. Jamie is actually the assistant to Diane’s son, Tyler, and has come in his place. For what reason? A little later, we learn that Henry, Diane’s husband, has died. And only later still do we begin to understand why Tyler hasn’t returned home for the funeral, sending Jamie instead.

That initial setup of misunderstandings and revelations grows increasingly complicated because Diane is a strong-willed woman who takes almost nothing in stride—least of all her son’s absence from the funeral. What happened between them to create so much tension? At the same time, it becomes clear that Jamie may be, or may once have been, more than just Tyler’s employee, and that tangled emotions lie beneath the situation. As they organize the funeral—dealing with everything from the church to buying food for the mourners—Jamie and Diane gradually reveal their secrets, argue, clash, and try to make sense of each other’s lives.

Miss You, Love You—its title referring to the way Tyler signs the letters he sends his mother—explores old family wounds, troubled marriages, complicated romantic relationships, and the secrets that exist between partners and between parents and children. Those secrets—and the inability to break free from them—have kept both characters from truly connecting with the people they love most. Ironically, the fact that Diane and Jamie are almost strangers allows them to speak with a candor that would have been impossible with those closest to them.

Written and directed by Jim Rash (co-directing with Nat Faxon), whose previous credits include The Way Way Back and Downhill, Miss You, Love You has both the strengths and weaknesses of something that, despite not actually being a play, often feels like one. Rash keeps the focus tightly fixed on a handful of characters and locations, but even the dramatic progression, the extended monologues, and, to some extent, the performances themselves adhere to theatrical conventions. On screen, that can make the film feel somewhat overwrought and overly talkative, even if its emotional beats often land.

That’s the central contradiction of Miss You, Love You. Its deliberately fragmented way of revealing information makes it difficult to connect with at first. But once the viewer settles into the parallel emotional journeys of its two protagonists—both of whom spend much of the film questioning and reassessing their pasts—it begins to flow more naturally, becoming dramatically richer and more affecting while remaining faithful to its minimalist premise. By the time Diane and Jamie finally open their hearts and reveal the truth, they discover they have far more in common than either of them ever imagined.