The Life List (2025)

The Life List arrives from Netflix and director Adam Brooks, adapted from Lori Nelson Spielman's novel, and it opens on a familiar bargain. Alex, played by Sofia Carson, loses her mother to cancer and learns that the inheritance comes with conditions. A stack of videos, a bucket list written at thirteen, a young lawyer with a clipboard. The dead mother has designed a curriculum for the living daughter, and the daughter must pass.

The cultural inventory here is thin, and the film is honest enough not to pretend otherwise. The supporting cast is notably multiracial, and the film lets that fact sit there without a speech or a pat on its own back. There is no LGBTQ+ presence, no environmental conscience, no argument about money, even though money is the engine of the plot. The inheritance functions as a family device, not an indictment of wealth. The closest the film comes to a thesis is Alex refusing to shrink herself for a boyfriend who cannot tolerate her noise and her friends. That is self-actualization of the oldest romantic comedy vintage, and it predates any of our current cultural weather.

Where the film leans hardest is in its gentle instruction. The mother's videos dispense life lessons with the patience of a greeting card, and the four-point true love test is a rubric handed to us so we can grade the suitors ourselves. It is soft sermonizing, the sort the genre has always allowed, and it never hardens into a lecture. The result is affable, watchable, and forgotten by dinner. Critics offered a shrug, audiences gave it a weekend at the top of the streaming chart. A modest film with modest ambitions, and its progressive credentials are equally modest.