The Life List (2025) Review – The Dreams We Carried as Children Know Something We Forgot

 

Header illustration for the review essay of The Life List (2025).

Illustration created for editorial review purposes.

💭 Short Personal Reflection

The Life List (2025) found me at exactly the right moment. A few years ago, after a routine health checkup led to further testing, I sat in a hospital waiting room and felt a fear I hadn't expected — not for myself, but for my daughters. The thought of them being left behind without me overwhelmed everything else. Thankfully, it turned out to be nothing serious. But that day left something behind: a quiet realization of what truly matters most. Watching this film, I finally understood the mother who left her daughter a life list to complete. Perhaps she knew something I was only beginning to learn — that a life built around someone else's definition of success is far less meaningful than one shaped by the small, honest dreams we once held as children. As a Netflix romantic drama about grief, rediscovery, and the courage to choose your own life, The Life List asks a question worth sitting with long after the credits roll.

🎥 Film Overview

Director	Adam Brooks
Release	March 28, 2025 (Netflix)
Runtime	123 minutes
Cast	Sofia Carson (Alex Rose), Kyle Allen (Brad), Sebastian de Souza (Garrett), Connie Britton (Elizabeth Rose)

📖 Story Summary

In the American romantic drama The Life List (2025), written and directed by Adam Brooks and based on Lori Nelson Spielman's novel, we follow Alex Rose — a thirty-something New Yorker who has quietly folded her life into her mother's world. When her mother Elizabeth dies of cancer, Alex discovers an unusual condition in the will: to receive her inheritance, she must complete every item on a life list she wrote at age thirteen. Each task, once completed, unlocks a pre-recorded DVD message from her mother — a series of small letters from beyond, gently nudging Alex back toward the person she was always meant to become.

What follows is part romantic comedy, part family drama, and entirely about the question of whether we are truly living — or simply going through the motions of a life we never consciously chose.

🌸 Key Themes

What We Bury When We Grow Up

The life list Alex wrote at thirteen is both charming and quietly devastating. Its items — learn piano, fall in love, make a difference — are the uncomplicated wishes of a child who had not yet learned to be practical. The film asks what happens to those wishes when adulthood arrives: do they disappear, or do they simply go somewhere we stop looking?

Elizabeth's gift is not the list itself but the permission it grants. By tying it to the inheritance, she removes every reasonable excuse Alex might have made. She cannot be too busy. She cannot be too old. She has to try. And in trying, Alex begins to remember not just who she wanted to be, but why she stopped wanting it.

A Mother's Letter, Written in Tasks

The DVD messages Elizabeth leaves are the film's most quietly powerful device. Each one arrives after Alex has completed something difficult — not as a reward, but as a continuation of a conversation the two of them never quite finished. Elizabeth does not lecture or direct. She simply shows up, as mothers do, to witness.

There is something in this about the love that outlasts presence. The film understands that what a parent most wants to leave behind is not money or advice, but the knowledge that someone believed in you — fully, specifically, without condition. Elizabeth's life list is her way of saying: I saw you. I always saw you.

Choosing Your Own Happiness

Beneath the romantic comedy structure, The Life List is about a woman learning to distinguish between the life she inherited and the life she actually wants. Alex has been dutiful, responsible, and invisible to herself for years. Each item on the list asks her to be a little more honest — about what she enjoys, what she fears, and what she has been pretending not to want.

The film does not make this transformation dramatic. It happens in small moments: a piano lesson, a dinner with old friends, a conversation she finally lets herself have. The cumulative effect is a portrait of someone slowly returning to herself — not through a single revelation, but through the gentle accumulation of honest choices.

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Adam Brooks and the Warmth of Restraint

Few directors working in romantic drama today handle sentiment as carefully as Adam Brooks, known for Definitely, Maybe (2008). Brooks brings to The Life List the same quality that made that earlier film memorable: a genuine interest in people, and a refusal to let warmth tip into sentimentality. He trusts the premise to do its work without forcing emotional beats, and his direction of the film's quieter scenes — particularly the DVD moments — shows real confidence.

The New York locations ground the film in a lived-in world rather than a glossy one. And the recurring motif of Debussy's "Clair de Lune" — which Sofia Carson learned to actually play for the role — gives the film an unexpected emotional anchor, returning at key moments like a question the film keeps asking.

Sofia Carson and Connie Britton

Sofia Carson carries the film with a naturalness that suits the role well. Alex is not a character who announces her feelings; she is someone who has spent years learning not to — and Carson plays that restraint with patience and care. The moments where something breaks through are all the more affecting for it.

Connie Britton, in what is essentially a supporting role distributed across a series of recorded messages, manages to make Elizabeth fully present throughout. Her warmth is specific rather than generic — this is not a saintly movie mother, but a woman who made her own mistakes and loved her daughter without quite knowing how to say so. It is a small, precise, deeply felt performance.

🌍 Where to Watch

Streaming: Netflix (worldwide)

Note: Availability varies by region and may change over time. Please check current listings in your area.

📝 Final Thoughts

Beneath its romantic drama surface, The Life List quietly asks a deeper question: how much of the life you are living did you actually choose — and is it too late to begin again?

The Life List is a gentle, warm-hearted film that earns its emotional moments without demanding too much. It will not be everyone's film — it is soft where it might have been sharper, and tidy where life rarely is. But for those who are willing to meet it where it is, it offers something genuinely worth receiving: the reminder that the small dreams we carried as children knew something real. More than anything else, The Life List remains a quiet letter from a mother to a daughter — and to anyone still figuring out how to live.

⭐ Who Will Appreciate This Film

For those who have ever set aside their own wishes in order to meet someone else's expectations — and who have wondered, somewhere along the way, when it became so difficult to want things for themselves. Perfect for a quiet weekend evening, perhaps shared with someone you love. Recommended for viewers who loved Julie & Julia (2009) or Eat Pray Love (2010) — films where a woman's return to herself is treated as the most important journey she can take. And if The Life List's mother-daughter love stayed with you, Miss Granny (2014) will find you again in its own way.

💭 Personal Note

I watched The Life List thinking about my daughters. Not in a sentimental, abstract way — but specifically, concretely, in the way you think about the people whose faces come to mind first when you are afraid.

That day in the hospital waiting room taught me something I hadn't been able to articulate until I watched this film. It is not that my daughters are more important than I am. It is that loving them taught me, finally, what I actually value — and how little of my daily life had been arranged around those values. I had been dutiful, organized, responsible. I had been, in so many ways, performing a life rather than living one.

Elizabeth's DVD messages undid me completely. Not because they were dramatic, but because they were so quiet. So ordinary. So much like the things I want to say to my own daughters — not as instructions, but as permission. It is okay not to be grand. It is enough to walk toward what makes your heart alive, and to do it with joy.

If there is anything I hope to leave behind, it is this: not a list of achievements, but the freedom to choose your own happiness. Maybe that is what all mothers wish for. Not to walk the path for their children, but to become a small, quiet light — just enough to help them not lose their way.

딸들에게, 그리고 나 자신에게, 어쩌면 자기 삶을 살아가고 있는 모든 이들에게 -
우리의 삶의 목록은, 이미 우리 안에 있었는지도 모른다.

(A reflection in Korean — because some truths about motherhood and the permission to live feel truer in the language of the heart.)

💬 Join the Conversation

Is there something from your younger self's wish list that you have quietly set aside — and do you think it is too late to return to it? And what is the most meaningful thing someone has left behind for you, not in words, but in the way they believed in you?

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If The Life List's meditation on motherhood, grief, and the quiet courage to choose your own life resonated with you, these films offer their own gentle sanctuaries:

• Miss Granny (2014) – A grandmother rediscovers the girl she once was, and what she never stopped wanting
• Julie & Julia (2009) – A woman finds her way back to herself through the transformative act of cooking
• Eat Pray Love (2010) – A journey inward, outward, and toward the life one was afraid to want
• Begin Again (2013) – A woman rediscovers her voice after years of living for someone else's dream
• Little Women (2019) – Four sisters navigate the tension between what they want and what the world will allow them to have

May you find your own list — and the courage to begin, one small dream at a time.

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👤 About the Author

Young Lee writes at Cinematic Sanctuaries, exploring stories where grief, love, and the quiet courage to return to oneself are treated as the most human journeys of all.

Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.