The Lost Husband: A Shallow, Predictable Hallmark Copycat

I like to walk into a movie with an open mind, but when the title alone sounds like a chatbot created it, we're already off on the wrong foot. As for The Lost Husband itself, it's a retread of already-unimpressive tropes repeated countless times over, and because it refuses to allow its characters to be anything more than a collection of well-worn cliches, it willingly limits itself to reminding us why Hallmark - which it's so obviously inspired by - became a household name amongst both critics and audiences for all the wrong reasons. It is the type of movie you watch when you want to be left utterly unchanged and unchallenged. Perhaps criticizing it for its overly modest ambitions is unjust, but it tries nothing new, says nothing new, and adds nothing of value to an already-overcrowded genre that is becoming more congested by the day. It was created precisely for people who are afraid of new things. 

Again, The Lost Husband is essentially a Hallmark movie about a newly single mom named Libby, and if you approach it on those terms alone, you could walk away with something worthwhile. However, I think we're all familiar with the infamous clichés of the Hallmark Channel, from patchy acting to unsubtle sentimentality to production design so underdone it's bordering on reality television. In a way, this movie is set up to fail by its own modest goals, which are nothing more than to copy the countless cheesy romances that came before it without so much as a hint of original thought. It is counting on your good memories of other, better love stories to court favor, and its lack of original ideas is so inoffensive that it ironically angered me. This movie is utterly void of any creative merit, a shallow pastiche of other B-movies that barely did it better. 

Cinematography and production-wise, The Lost Husband is shot with all the inoffensive sterility of an insurance commercial. Its color palette is boring, its framing thoughtless, and the hair and makeup on all of the actors are always suffocatingly perfect. Its soundtrack is woefully overdone, to the point where it sounds like the filmmakers downloaded royalty-free instrumental music and played it over the top of scenes that would have been better served by a lack of it. This movie is terrified of silence, and music that would have sounded relatively good on its own is just plain intrusive when interlaced with drama whose emotional beats it doesn't keep pace with. Less is more is an utterly foreign idea to a movie that is also largely unfamiliar with how real people interact. 

For the most part, the acting in The Lost Husband is very bad, and approaching robotic at its worst. Almost all the actors seem bored, as if they've already emotionally checked out of a movie that couldn't be bothered to promise them anything more than a paycheck. They often begin to stare blankly into space for no apparent reason, like there's something profound just out of frame that we can't see. Granted, there are a couple of exceptions to this rule, with Nora Dunn's Jean being one of them. She's an embittered but also sweet woman with actual emotional variety and range, like a real person would have. The rugged O'Connor isn't bad either, a relatively inoffensive farmer who falls in love with the hopelessly boring Libby for reasons I cannot understand. He stands out from everyone else in this movie for the sole value of not sounding precisely like a robot.

There is one thing this movie does well, and that's efficiency. The Lost Husband is at its fleeting best when it trusts its audience enough to infer what happens between scenes, and leans on the occasional implication in a way that is refreshing, if only from its own lesser tendencies. Though virtually every part of this movie is a tired stereotype, it's not all forgettable formulas. Occasionally, it can be surprising, both for good reasons and because I had grown so accustomed to the bad ones. But what this efficiency still can't save it from is an utter lack of charm or originality. 

This movie is willingly closer to a total loss than I'd like. It is the type of story where you can tell exactly what will happen in it by just looking at its title, and The Lost Husband doesn't do anything to distance itself from the almost-uniquely overwhelming tropes associated with romances. Two characters of a different sex are being mean to each other? Yeah, they're going to fall hopelessly in love. A young, urban professional hates farm life? She'll probably adore it by the end, especially if it involves a hot man and an "unlikely" romance that brings soccer moms running. Forgive my hackneyed jesting, but you’ll be able to figure out how this movie will end before it even begins, and not in a good way. If I sound mean, it's because I'm annoyed. To be precise, I'm not upset that this movie is predictable, though it certainly is. I'm upset that it's content to trace out the countless Hallmark dramas we've seen come and go without so much as a thought for an identity to call its own. 

The Lost Husband is content to parrot shallow ideas that aren’t even its own, and while some of its weaknesses are its own, others are readily familiar to the romance genre as a whole. Maybe it wasn't made for me. Maybe I didn't get it. Maybe it's unfair of me to criticize it for not trying to excel. However, this is one of the purest forms of cinematic plagiarism I’ve seen in a little while, and the worst part is that it never really tries to hide it. 

The Lost Husband - 3/10

Mark 10:1-12